After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back

After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish, One Comes Back(phenomena.nationalgeographic.com)

90 points by srikar 10 years ago | 24 comments

wnoise 10 years ago |

> Mouritsen thinks, that the reason those warblers left Tennessee was not because they heard wisps of a distant superstorm but because of changes in atmospheric pressure.

Sound is changes in atmospheric pressure, and we're talking about infrasound which is really low frequency, so there's not exactly a sharp distinction here.

Dylan16807 10 years ago | |

There's still a pretty good distinction here. The baseline pressure actually changing vs. the pressure rising and falling every 4 seconds over and over.

ahazred8ta 10 years ago | |

TLDR - the pigeon problem coincided with high-decibel infrasound from sonic booms from the Concorde SST. That suggests they were temporarily deafened in that frequency band. (At 11 octaves below middle C, they're sensitive to anything over 0.1 Hertz.)

Dylan16807 10 years ago | | |

Is it actually possible to be specifically deafened at such a low frequency? There's no resonance down there, and it would be so much lower energy. I would expect all other hearing to be severely and possibly permanently impacted before infrasound could be deafened.

talktime 10 years ago |

I'd like something that keeps pigeons off my balcony. Surprisingly little works. I have a motion detecting sonic alarm that doesn't work - maybe it's in the wrong frequency for pigeons. I wonder if a motion detecting laser frightener would work better. Kickstarter anyone?

icebraining 10 years ago | |

You just need to militarize your balcony with Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4

fludlight 10 years ago | |

Have someone bring over their falcon every now and then: http://www.airstrikebirdcontrol.com/

pvaldes 10 years ago | |

You can try with a plastic or resin bird of prey figure.

bduerst 10 years ago | |

Have you tried a feline alarm system? Worked for us.

talktime 10 years ago | | |

Thanks. I'd like to give that a try. Do you have a link to the type of model that has worked for you?

IkmoIkmo 10 years ago | |

My mom bought a weak super soaker and has been spraying pigeons with water, she says it works.

Not sure I'd recommend it.

ck2 10 years ago |

I've got a feeling in a couple decades the military will declassify how they used some kind of new ULF device to talk to submarines and it had a power level equal to nuclear weapons.

And that as a side effect it screwed up all kinds of wildlife.

vanderZwan 10 years ago | |

Just plain sonar is bad enough, and that's been public knowledge for a while:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-military-sona...

shermablanca 10 years ago |

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

icebraining 10 years ago | |

Check out pg's (the creator of this site) own submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

The first page alone includes articles on the migration of monarch butterflies, boardinghouses, income taxes by US counties, doodles by medieval kids, health benefits of eating nuts, and more.