The Portland daily press., 1898-02-17
HoMlNe INSTINCTS OF BIRDS.
Capt. Renaud, the French Specialist, Con-
cIudes that They Have a Sixth Sense
That of Orientation.

Capt. Renaud, the French specialist in
charge of the military pigeon service, is
firm believer in a sixth sense in pigeons
and other birds and animals possessed of
the homing instinct, which he calls the
sense of forientation." He has defended
his theory Mt length in paper recently
read before the French Academic des
Sciences, claiming to have amply proved
it by special trials of various kinds. He
says if the five senges acting together &C.
counts for short distance "homing,' a
sixth sense is required for long distance
in unknown places. He says this organ
| is situated in the!semioiroular canals OF
the ear. M. Coyon and DIR. BONNER have
shown that any lesion which affects II
troubles the orienting faculty OF the
patient, whether man or animal. A pig
con let fly at 400 miles from its cote, takes
| the back track it has come by the rail
way. Having reached in this way the
region known to it, the bird relies on It's
ordinary senses, or else continues to de-
pend on Its sixth sense.
The sixth sense only acts when the
others are inactive, and not in conJano-
tion with them. 1t guides the bird along
the more or less SinuouS way 1T mas been
taken. The other senses, especially sight,
enable 1t to strike q short cut home.
From his observations, Capt. Renaud de-
duces this law: The instinct OF distant
orientation is that faculty which animals
possess of tax ing the back track or retrac-
ing a way already taken. The sixth sense
is apparently independents Of the external
Impressions which affect the other five
senses.
Here is new experiment that seems to
confirm his theory. If o pigeon does not
need local knowledge to find it's way
home, it is possible to have travelling
cote, and accustom the birds to wander
| ing life. Suppose the cote transplanted
bodily tosa Strange place, without in any
| way troubling the birds, these would still
| be, able to find their way back to it by the
sixth sense. Capt. Renaud has realizsd
this idea by mounting the cotes in
wagons travelling all over France. The
birds know nosother home, and in slocali-
| ties quite strange to them find their way
| back to it. Evidently a local knowledge
| is out of the question, they rely on a
| special sense.
Sometimes a homing bird passes over
the cote without seeing it, as though it
were hypnotized, and continues till it
reaches the station of the cote the evening
before. One bird retraced the travelling
cote from Baupame to Houdain, and then
followed the railway by which 1t had
come there to Evreux, where it was
caught. Capt. Renaud concludes that
existing theories, which ascribe homing
to local knowledge or local magnetic cur
rents, do not account for his facts, espec-
tally the return to a travelling home.
But, say the advocates of that theory, he
does not seem to understand the magnetic
theory of the faculty. The magnetic cur
rents of the earth are not local, but uni
versal, and wherever the cote is placed
the bird can guide itself BY them. His
experiments they say, SO far from con-
trovertingnthe magnetic hypothesis, tend
rather to confirm it, and had there been
an electrician at the "seance" of the
Academic when he read his paper, this
would have been pointed out.