Ever Wondered How Migrating Birds Find Their Way Back Home? The Answer Lies in Quantum Physics
You might have noticed a flock of hummingbirds sipping nectar from your feeder or a pair of trilling sandpipers creeping about in a bush to trap grasshoppers and insects. As autumn arrives, it’s time for birds to fly south. Not just hummingbirds or sandpipers, but dozens of them, including warblers, terns, and flycatchers who travel south, Rosy pelicans who migrate to India, and bar-tailed godwits who venture on a long-distance flight between Alaska and New Zealand.
None of these birds, however, has a map they use to navigate their long-distance flights. They know where to go even when they don’t have anyone or anything to follow. But Roswitha and Wolfgang Wiltschko, researchers from Germany, may have some ideas on how they find their direction, per The Smithsonian. All they need is light, that’s the first clue. Quantum physics could be the science behind it.
A celestial map
The first guide these feathered travellers have is the stars. While navigating during the night, the celestial night sky offers them the primary markers that they use to direct their flight. From the clusters of twinkling stars to constellations that blink, birds use these signs to know where to go next. According to Wonder Dome, they also use the rotation of the sky to find Polaris, which helps them orient their flights’ direction.
A unique sensory experience
Even if a robin or a songbird is left in a cage, when the season comes for their migration, you’d find them fluttering their wings in a specific direction. Unlike a human who would be disoriented without a definite map or compass, these birds seem to have an invisible GPS mysteriously fitted into their brains that secretly whispers to them whether it’s north or south.
The Smithsonian shares a story about Charles Walcott of Cornell, who began studying pigeons in the 1960s. He fondly stated that migrating birds, homing pigeons in particular, are “still a mystery.” He said, it’s a mistake to think that “we live in the same sensory world as other animals.” Humans might be eager enough to install birdcams in their garden and spy on birds day and night, but they’d never be able to understand the perplexing enigma of their long-distance flights. Though some scientists have figured out solid evidence: the Earth’s magnetic field.
Birds see it, sense it, and feel it. But nobody has any idea what they see when they see this magnetic field during their travels. “Birds have to use whatever information they can get from their environment when they’re migrating. If they want to use the sun or the stars, they have to interpret what they see. But the direction of the magnetic field is direct,” Roswitha Wiltschko, a biologist at Goethe University Frankfurt, said in a press release, per PBS Nova. Diving deeper, the scientists noticed that the way birds detect this magnetic field is a process quite similar to “quantum entanglement.”
What is ‘Quantum entanglement?’
Entanglement, according to Gizmodo, is a concept of quantum physics that describes a pair of electrons whose energies are entangled with each other. These electrons love to hang out in pairs. So while the birds are travelling and light strikes the retinas in their eyes, the light disrupts the entanglement between these electrons. This intense energy causes them to pull apart from each other, but they are still fiddling around together in a protein molecule called cryptochrome, which surrounds the retina of the bird’s eye.
When light hits this protein layer and causes the electrons to become excited and disorientated, one of the electrons gets freed, becoming a “free radical.” Something called “spin angular momentum” triggers the freed electron to spin and wobble. Meanwhile, the other electron tells the bird what direction it needs to take next on its migrating journey. The entire science behind these long-distance migrations is still a puzzle for the bird scientists, but this “quantum physics” clue will tell you why the rose-breasted grosbeak is swooping every few minutes to gobble up the sunflower seeds in your feeder. It’s time for him to depart to the south.
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