The factors affecting the olfaction-based navigational performances of homing pigeons released at relatively long distance (beyond 100 km from home) have in past been subject to several investi...

a total of 332 birds including 149 sparrows, 147 doves and 36 pigeons were examined for toxoplasma infection by both direct agglutination for detecting antibodies to toxoplasma and direct parasitological test to detect the cyst of toxoplasma in the brain of birds. the toxoplasma sero-positive rate (spr) in the examined birds was 10.5 percent (27 cases) with titers of 1:40 or higher and spr in e...

characterization of isolated pigeon paramyxovirus-1 (pmv-1) and its pathogenicity in broiler chickens were studied. two hundred and thirty-two samples collected from 50 unvaccinated pigeons lofts suspected to newcastle disease from private houses and bird markets from ahvaz , iran. swab samples from cloaca and oropharynx of live pigeons and from trachea, lung, liver, spleen, kidney, brain, prov...

Flying is an energy demanding activity that imposes several physiological challenges on birds, such as increase in energy expenditure. Evidence from sports medicine shows that exhausting exercise may cause oxidative stress. Studies on avian flight have so far considered several blood parameters, such as uric acid, corticosteroids, or circulating free fatty acids, but only one study has analysed...

BACKGROUND Pigeons (Columba livia) have been kept as pet and reared for food in several countries including Iran. Ectoparasites are regarded as the basic causes of retardation in growth, lowered vitality and poor conditions of the birds. Pseudolynchia canariensis a hippoboscidae fly is one of the important ectoparasites of pigeons and is responsible for the transmission of pathogens to birds an...

15 We analyse the tracks of clock-shifted pigeons from six releases to determine how pigeons cope with the conflict between their sun compass and the other navigational cues. Time-lag embedding is used to calculate the short-term correlation dimension, a parameter that reflects the complexity of the navigational system and with it, the number of factors involved. In the beginning, while pigeons...

We deployed the Multiple Necessary Cues (MNC) discrimination task to see if pigeons can simultaneously attend to four different dimensions of complex visual stimuli. Specifically, we trained nine pigeons (Columba livia) on a go/no go discrimination to peck only 1 of 16 compound stimuli created from all possible combinations of two stimulus values from four separable visual dimensions: shape (ci...

Various flight navigation strategies for birds have been identified at the large spatial scales of migratory and homing behaviours. However, relatively little is known about close-range obstacle negotiation through cluttered environments. To examine obstacle flight guidance, we tracked pigeons (Columba livia) flying through an artificial forest of vertical poles. Interestingly, pigeons adjusted...

Most theories and experimental investigations of discrimination learning and categorization, in both humans and animals, hypothesize that attention must be allocated to the relevant attributes of the training stimuli for learning to occur. Attention has conventionally been inferred after learning has transpired rather than examined while learning is transpiring. We presented pigeons with a visu...