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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Incredible that it never lost its bearings.

To me, that is WAY more impressive (so is the 4700m altitude!). The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.

That's some amazing navigation skill.

> The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.

And I got lost on one of the simplest hiking trails in a neighboring town last week. I tried to go off-path to circumvent a fallen tree. After about 15 minutes of thinking that I was just steps from reaching my destination, I ended up back at my starting point! I'm ashamed.

I believe this is how humanity will die. Internal TomTom degradation!!!

I don't know about this specific bird, but many birds have what are essentially biological compasses built into them.

Not sure why this was flagged dead. It's a fact that some birds are sensitive to magnetic fields [1]:

> They do this with the help of the magnetically sensitive proteins in their eyes and the magneto-receptive cells in the vestibular nucleus in their brain.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2022-02-compass-birds-ways-foreign.htm....

Allegedly, dogs too. Unclear how but they align north-south when pooping if they get the chance.

Yes, but that by itself does not help all that much?

I give you a compass and an 11 hour ride on a typhoon. The compass won't give you magical ability to return to your starting spot.

The compass allows me to track in which direction I'm roughly blown. Not on the scale of seconds, but hours. As soon as I escape the typhoon, I can start going back.

You're forgetting that it had GPS!

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