Research, technology, and more Research.
Image from: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/2074002/pigeons_can_inform_navigation_technology_design/
When it comes to bird navigation, we know relatively little. Most of what we know about a bird’s ability to navigate is merely speculation. Granted this speculation is based on experts’ years of understanding and careful consideration, it is still theorized with little to no hard facts on the matter. “The identification of the sensory cues and mechanisms by which migratory birds are able to reach the same breeding and wintering grounds year after year has eluded biologists despite the more than fifty years of intensive study” (Holland et al., 2009). The lack of evidence is due to a number of barriers: financial resources, comprehension of unknown senses, lacking technological equipment, lagging research techniques to get adequate data and evidence, as well as ethical ways to study these senses in birds. Our biggest challenge in researching navigation is the ability to recreate a naturally occurring environment in which the birds would normally live. Our next best option is to attempt to study birds in their natural habitat, but we do not currently have the technology to do so. An experienced group of biologists, zoologists, neurobiologists, and psychologists discuss the lagging technology for our fast-developing needs in an article in The Journal of Experimental Biology, “Despite what has been learned from laboratory studies, questions about how birds employ navigation systems during migration have remained largely inaccessible for logistical reasons.” (Guilford et al., 2011). Until we can develop technology that will accurately record the bird’s brain activity and sensory organs as it navigates then we cannot study them precisely in real world navigation. Another reason that makes this task seem unattainable is the ability to remove the humanness of our understanding. As humans, we tend to solve the unknowns of animals, such as their behaviors, actions, or anatomy, and relate it back to a human example. This makes an unknown ability like bird navigation much harder to solve because there is no comparison whatsoever to anything human related. The obscurity of how they navigate is difficult to wrap our human brains around. These are the reasons we have fallen so far behind on the understanding of bird navigation compared to other scientific mysteries.