You cans still find in science textbooks the claim that homing pigeons can use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way back home, and various migratory animals can use the Earth’s magnetic field to migrate, even when they migrate alone, over territory they had never visited before. The claim is tone of the worst goofs the whole history of the Behavioral Science, second only to the Nobel winning “discovery” that honeybee-recruits can obtain & use distance & direction information contained in their foragers’-dances to help them find the foragers’ food-source on their own.

All these science-fiction stories are based on very shoddy, misguided research.

For instance, the claim concerning homing pigeons is based on studies where homing pigeons , transported to a release site, and released after having very strong magnets attached to their backs, were unable to depart in any specific direction, whereas controls, that were released without magnets, circled overhead, and then departed in the home-direction. The scientists who carried out the study did not have enough “brains’ to realize that when a very strong magnet is attached to a bird, the bird is attached to the magnet. It was not the birds, but the strong magnets, that reacted to the Earth’s magnetic field, aligning themselves with the direction of the magnetic forces, thus causing the birds attached to them, to turn into such an alignment, thus preventing the birds from being free to turn into any desired direction!