Free Republic

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other...

How Vikings Might Have Navigated on Cloudy Days By Corey Binns Special to LiveScience posted: 02 March 2007 08:33 am ET Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently. A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have...

How do homing pigeons navigate? They follow roads By Caroline Davies (Filed: 05/02/2004) Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads. Zoologists now believe the phrase "as the crow flies" no longer means the shortest most direct route between two points. They say it is likely that crows and other diurnal birds also choose AA-suggested routes, even though it makes their journeys longer. Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts. Animal behaviouralists...