Many birds have a sixth sense. No, not seeing dead people: They detect Earth’s magnetic field, an ability that allows them to return to the same sites, year after year, during seasonal migration.

Right: orientation of birds experiencing the simulated magnetic field of a site in Russia while still being at the study site in Austria. Arrows depict the respective mean group direction.

Disturbances to Earth's magnetic field can lead birds astray -- a phenomenon scientists call 'vagrancy' -- even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other factors such ...

U.S. military-funded research on how birds migrate in the winter could one day allow troops to navigate using the Earth’s magnetic fields. The findings, announced last week, could result in a ...

Finally a story about birds that doesn’t involve them falling out of the sky. We know that robins, like many other animals, uses the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, but we don’t know how.

The magnetic fields used were also stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. "It therefore still needs to be shown that this is happening in the eyes of birds" Mouritsen stresses. Such studies are ...

To test whether birds plot their course from takeoff using magnetic fields, we put the Emlen funnels inside a “Helmholtz coil” – a device that allows us to change the nature of the magnetic ...

Life Migrating birds may use slope of Earth’s magnetic field as ‘stop sign’ Eurasian reed warblers migrate to sub-Saharan Africa each year – and they seem to use the slope of Earth’s ...

Disturbances to Earth’s magnetic field can lead birds astray — a phenomenon scientists call “vagrancy” — even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other ...

In the animal world, many are also able to sense the magnetic field of the earth. Researchers have reported new findings on magnetic sensing in birds and recently presented their research.

Together with an international team of scientists, he investigated another sense birds can use to help them—the earth’s magnetic field. Peter Hore is a physical chemist on that team at the ...