r/NatureIsFuckingLit
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u/DrMabuseKafe
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5d ago
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š„Falcon flew over 10.000 km from South Africa to Finland
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u/Pertinax71 5d ago edited 5d ago
It is a Finnish project. To get deeper insight into honey buzzard movement and migration ecology close to 40 Finnish honey buzzards have been harnessed with satellite transmitters in Western Finland starting in 2011.
http://www.luomus.fi/en/satellite-honey-buzzards
PƤivi got her transmitter at her nest in Vesilahti (Finland) on August 13th 2013. https://satelliitti.laji.fi/?lang=en&id=JX.697&speed=30&zoom=2&loc=[24.02129839849867,18.86025]&layer=0&start_time=2013-08-27T13:00:00%2B00:00&iframe=true
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u/shodan13 5d ago
PƤivi is a very cute name, right up there with Satu.
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u/vaskikissa 5d ago
Fun fact, Satu also means a fairytale.
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u/DomineeringDrake 5d ago
In that case does satunnainen mean satu's woman?
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u/scepticalbob 5d ago
That is facsinating
Thank you for sharing
The tracking stopped in 2019. Do you know if that is because the falcon died?
Edit, I just saw that the tracking chip died.
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u/superdavy 5d ago
Here is another good one.. Duck migrated from Louisiana to Russia and back.
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u/Zanclodon 5d ago
Falcon taking credit for a Honey Buzzard's accomplishment.
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u/tryingtodefendhim 5d ago
Honey buzzard don't give no fucks. That's how you get honey in your name, suger.
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/Zanclodon 5d ago
Yes the picture is of a Peregrine, but the bird that actually did this migration was a Honey Buzzard. This post named and showed the wrong species. " Africa Facts Zone" got most of the facts wrong.
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u/Munnin41 5d ago
But the bird in the picture isn't a honey buzzard. It's a peregrine
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u/Mr_Pogi_In_Space 5d ago
And the caption says the tracker was put in South Africa, not Finland. Everything's wrong on it
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u/Turtle1265 5d ago edited 4d ago
One might say the
hawk*Falcon Finnished its journey!On a serious note, a really cool project. š
*edit- poor reading comprehension
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u/escobizzle 5d ago
You'd edited this comment and still left "I'm be might say" in š¤¦
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u/luckycommander 5d ago
So neither is it data from a Peregrine falcon and neither did the Honey Buzzard complete it in 42 days. What a misleading post by OP.
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u/domper 5d ago
PƤivi has started! 25.4.2017 09:09 (GMT)
PƤivi is back! 7.6.2017 18:10 (GMT)
So about 43 days if I'm reading it right. Not really misleading.
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u/Industrialpainter89 5d ago
I don't understand why the picture is of a different bird?
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u/Johnny_Poppyseed 5d ago
Bro it's a random Twitter style post from like 6 years ago, probably shared on a 100 different clickbait sites and reposted here countless times as well before op, who chances are is probably a bot himself, shared this today.
Idk what kind of accuracy or accountability you are expecting here lol.
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u/Industrialpainter89 5d ago
Sorry this was my first time seeing it, I didn't know the history. š
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u/cinlung 5d ago
She seems to have taken the shortest path where lands are near.
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u/BlueFlob 5d ago
It's definitely the straightest path, avoiding deserts and large bodies of water where it can't rest.
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u/A_Martian_Potato 5d ago
The amazing part for me is that it seems like she knew she had to veer right in South Sudan in order to avoid the Sahara. She didn't actually wait until she hit the desert.
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u/fsurfer4 5d ago
It was more likely the heat. Flying into the desert would be like hitting a blast furnace.
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u/labadimp 4d ago
Maybe felt the thermals/heat prior to being there. I dont know though. I dont fly and am not a bird.
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u/SpaceShipRat 5d ago
down the Nile to avoid the desert
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u/Jet_Funk 5d ago
That is not down the Nile, the Nile if further west, it's just along the Red sea
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u/moderndaynomad 5d ago
The path kids west to trace the Nile from what I can tell once she hits the the northern part of the sea. I bet way better opportunities present themselves on the Nile than the Suez Canal
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u/21022018 5d ago
How did she know the direction so accurately?
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u/Megelsen 5d ago
They have magnetic particles (probably wrong terminology) in their eyes, so they can kind of see magnetic fields, just as we see colors.
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u/wambamclamslam 5d ago
They have this complicated protein in their eye that bounces electrons inside. The electrons movement from one spot it can rest to the next is magnetically sensitive. The data the bird brain receives from how those electrons move is what it parses into "seeing" the direction of the magnetic field.
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u/Crackgnome 5d ago
It's even a level more complicated than that! The proteins are free floating in the fluid of their eyes, but they are able to sense changes through them thanks to quantum entanglement of the electrons in the proteins, established naturally by the mechanism that produces the proteins. Effectively, they produce entangled pairs of electrons, one goes out and floats in the eye while the other remains attached to whatever nerve mechanism, and changes in the floating protein are mirrored in the other thanks to what Einstein described as "spooky action at a distance."
So basically they're hacking physics to allow them to instantaneously detect changes in a protein without any physical connection to said protein.
Biology is fucking weird y'all
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u/SuperMajesticMan 5d ago
Man humans are so boring. All we got is big Brain and good stamina.
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u/Jerker_Circle 5d ago
damn evolution is crazy
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u/Crackgnome 5d ago
And as the entanglement model is the result of a fairly recent discovery, I'm guessing we've only scratched the surface of weird quantum effects present across all of nature.
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u/wambamclamslam 5d ago
Birds can see the magnetic field. Most migration is directly parallel to the magnetic field and the bird probably navigated east to avoid the heat and lack of landing zones over the desert and sea. The shortest path, due to Earth's curvature, is definitely through the crust of the Earth.
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u/iwanttheworldnow 5d ago
Sheās been to more countries than I have
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u/nachiketajoshi 5d ago
Cool to see how she avoids flying over water, just to make sure she does not have to worry about the Sully ditching in the Hudson River situation ;-)
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u/berthejew 5d ago
She flies adjacent when she can, probably for fish. Truly interesting!
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u/InfernalCape 5d ago
Actually fish are one of the few things they are not known to eat. Their main diet consists of wasps, but theyāll eat other things like bees, beetles, lizards, worms, small mammals, young birds, and carrion. The coastline probably serves as an easily-recognizable landmark. And, generally speaking, there tends to be life near water so the coast probably serves as a reliable spot to stop and grab a (terrestrial) snack along the way when traversing a huge range of habitats.
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5d ago
thats ok, you are not a migratory bird
you dont have to travel 20,000 miles a year and put photos on instagram to be worldly, that is just some new thing in the last 100? years that everyone has to be a world traveler to be classy or worldly or educated.
you can learn from the internet, and help your local community!
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u/ClubSundown 4d ago
Even more impressive is the Arctic tern which flies from the Arctic to Antarctica coast every year. Annual round-trip lengths of aboutĀ 70,900Ā km (44,100Ā mi)
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u/fromwayuphigh 5d ago
Apparently Sudan didn't give her overflight privileges. Damn you, Khartoum!
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u/Reeftankz10000 5d ago
Looks like it was taking the Nile, assuming for food.
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u/ILL_Show_Myself_Out 5d ago
Perhaps it brought a coconut.
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u/herkufels1 5d ago
is it an african or a european falcon?
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u/ClubSundown 4d ago edited 4d ago
Her mom's African, her dad's European. They're separated so she commutes between their homes
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u/WORKING2WORK 5d ago
How would it bring a coconut?
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u/puffyjunior1 5d ago
Perhaps a swallow carried it for him
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u/PanMan-Dan 5d ago
I wouldnāt want to risk too much time in Sudan either to be fair, canāt blame her
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u/Dazzling_Ad5338 5d ago
For those who will ask, they avoid the sea because there's no where to land.
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u/PersianGay 5d ago
So they can not land in the water like a duck or a gull could?
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u/TheMintFairy 4d ago
More than likely can't fly with saturated feathers would be my guess. Although I'm not a bird expert or anything.
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u/dray1214 4d ago
Bird lawyer here. While thereās no law preventing the bird from legally flying with saturated wings, Iād advise against it.
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u/Quantainium 4d ago
Huge danger to land in the middle of the ocean even if they could fly in a few seconds. Chomp
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u/Confident_Weird3353 5d ago
Assuming 8 hour work day it flew an incredible 40km/hr
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u/Spartacus980F 5d ago
Hang on...it flew 40km / hour X 8 hours = 320kms, versus the 230kms the article says.
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u/nirbot0213 5d ago
40 hours per week. average was 230 km per day but if itās not working weekends then working speed is 40.25 kph.
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u/malgalad 5d ago
I don't think a buzzard is aware of the concept of weekends.
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u/imapilotaz 5d ago
Even the bird said "fuck if Im going to the Sudan"
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u/-TrevWings- 5d ago
Why do we say "the" Sudan instead of just Sudan? Similar reason to why some people say the Ukraine?
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u/Tachyoff 5d ago
a place that was traditionally viewed as a region, rather than a country. The Sudan, The Congo, The Ukraine (though they've been asking people to drop the "the" for a while now)
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u/best_of_badgers 5d ago
Okay so, this bird can sense longitude.
Longitude is a hard problem that took humans nearly three centuries of science and engineering to solve. Even today, itās only fully solved by GPS.
What, exactly, is the falcon doing to enable this sense?
My guess would be that it has a very precise circadian rhythm and can tell where it is based on solar noon vs internal time.
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u/Firm_Bit 5d ago
Apparently itās unproven but the leading theory is that they can sense/see magnetic fields. Since the magnetic fields on earth stretch from north to south the are a proxy for longitude.
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u/best_of_badgers 5d ago
Magnetic declination is certainly an option. An animal with a magnetic sense could sense the absolute direction of the magnetic north and south poles. For this particular falcon, it would feel like an object below the ground a lot of the time.
However, that method is easier if you just need to move in a straight line toward the pole. This falcon follows water sources way to the east, then back to their original line of longitude. Thatās a bit more complicated than just heading toward a magnetic pole.
I suspect itās using a combination of senses, and probably some ground landmarks.
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u/hiboJBob 5d ago
Iāve read a couple of papers looking into this when I was in school, specifically in the European Robin. The mechanism proposed was quite complex but the way they illustrated the way it might be interpreted by the bird was akin to the as patterns that occur when you rotate two polarized filters while looking through them. But itās the retinas they sense it with and in combination with a knowledge of local landmarks, itās quite effective.
Iāll leave a much more recent article if you like. Itās a hell of a subject.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/fd/c9fd00049f
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u/baarish84 5d ago
Thank you for the link. I really tried to comprehend the text summary. I will not be trying again sooner.
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u/egelof 5d ago
Let's see if OpenAI can help:
Scientists believe that migratory songbirds use a magnetic compass to navigate long distances. The compass relies on the behavior of certain particles in the bird's eye called radicals. These radicals interact with the Earth's magnetic field, which allows the bird to sense direction.
To understand this process better, researchers have been investigating whether quantum mechanics (a branch of physics that deals with the behavior of particles on a very small scale) is necessary to explain how the radicals behave. They found that classical methods of modeling the behavior of these particles only work when the particles are not interacting with each other. This is unlikely to be the case for the magnetic sensing function. So, to accurately simulate the magnetic field effects relevant to bird navigation, full quantum mechanical calculations are needed.
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u/SpaceshipOperations 5d ago
I suspect itās using a combination of senses, and probably some ground landmarks.
I want to point out that memory may also play a role in path selection for migrating birds. If the bird has traveled with its flock when it was young, then it learned the path from the flock. With that in mind, a species could have developed their current optimal path over many iterations of migration (spanning over many generations).
Birds have incredible locational memory.
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u/Han-ChewieSexyFanfic 4d ago
It doesnāt need to sense longitude, it just needs to follow the gradient of latitude (the magnetic field).
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u/Luigi_Dagger 5d ago
Now, put the tracker on a coconut and do a swallow
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u/Disastrous-Kick-3498 4d ago
Damn I really had to scroll to find a single reference to Monty python
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u/Practical-Finding-77 5d ago
At first I was like 10.000 km in 42 days thats alot of sig figs
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u/Viridis_Coy 4d ago
Semi-related; a few years back a stork with a tracking device was killed and had the SIM card stolen. The charity that owned the tracker received an enormous phone bill.
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u/scepticalbob 5d ago
of the 12 trips, up and back, only 5 did she fly extended periods over water.
I'm assuming this is for food/hunting purposes.
But one of the trips (flying south) she flew over the body of the mediterranean.
The article doesn't mention how fast they can fly, but I am assuming this would take at least 2 days to cover, without food or rest.
That's pretty incredible
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u/JJ_edi343 5d ago
For anyone wondering how they travel in straight lines, birds can see the magnetic field lines connecting the north and South Pole. Itās like a giant white streak in the sky extending from pole to pole. They just fly under the same line everyday. This is an effect of quantum mechanics and some structures they have in their brains that mammals like us donāt have
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u/Academiajayceissohot 5d ago
I think that is a bit misleading because the magnetic field doesn't exist as 'a line' in the sky.
I think it would be more like a fish swimming in a river, and the river's current is the magnetic field. Water is everywhere like the magnetic field so no matter where they are they can sense which way the current is flowing so they travel with or against the current.
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u/bezzlege 5d ago
This is incredibly fascinating if true, got a source?
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u/SmArty117 5d ago
This is not an effect of quantum mechanics any more than your eyesight is an effect of quantum mechanics.
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u/gidonfire 5d ago
The bird isn't navigating by eyesight. They feel the magnetic field as a sense like you feel heat.
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u/GeraldBWilsonJr 5d ago
I imagine that the sensation is similar to when a part of your body is close to something with a very high static charge and you can feel it in the air
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u/JJ_edi343 5d ago
Everything is quantum mechanics. The entire system of the universe bro
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u/SmArty117 5d ago
Yes that's the point, you don't go around saying trees are a consequence of QM do you? It's basically meaningless
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u/Lord_Quintus 5d ago
this violation of the birds privacy is unbelievable. they are tracked everywhere they go! i can't think of any other animal that would put up with this for even a second!
- sent from my iphone
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u/StrikeZone1000 4d ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch
Itās been known birds migrate between Europe and Africa for a long time, due to African spears being found in living birds.
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u/Internetboy5434 4d ago
Quick facts The falcon female (called the āfalconā by falconers) is larger than the male (called the ātiercelā). Adult males are 15 to 18 inches long and weigh about 1 1/4 pounds, while the females are 18 to 21 inches long and weigh about 2 pound
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u/AinsleysPepperMill 5d ago
Imagine all the stuff she saw in those 42 days, can't imagine how cool it would be to be able to fly