How Birds Find Their Way: Avian Orientation and Navigation

This book describes our current understanding of the navigation of birds, their methods, capabilities, and achievements. Our knowledge of this field has progressed immensely in the last fifty years, due to the availability of miniaturized tracking and positioning devices, which now allow us to know when and where a specific bird is located and where it is flying. The book is written for a general readership and requires no more of the reader than a true interest in the topic. The text provides accessible overview of the relevant geographic and geophysical basics (latitudes and longitudes, geomagnetism) and of the neural faculties that allow birds to identify these features. The author surveys a variety of striking avian achievements, ranging from trans-ocean and pole-to-pole flights to circumnavigations of the earth. Readers will also learn how the required knowledge is provided and passed on to future generations, through instinct as well as through experience. Our understanding of such information transfer is today much deeper than it was fifty years ago. Nevertheless, many open questions remain. How an albatross leaving the coast of Brazil can find the way to its nest on a rock off the coast of New Zealand—this is a question still waiting to be answered. Thus, a further purpose of the book is to stimulate additional interest and new research into the fascinating and challenging world of avian navigation.

Helmut Satz is a German theoretical physicist, working on strongly interacting matter and complex systems. He received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1963, and from 1971, he was a full professor of physics at the University of Bielefeld, with lengthy sojourns at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, USA, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has published over 200 scientific papers in leading physics journals, and in the past ten years, five popular science books with Oxford University Press and Springer. He is a member of the Academies of Science of Finland and of Poland and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Wroclaw in Poland.