Dead reckoning using only a compass does you little good if you integrate over days (or more: for migrating animals, integration period would be months), more so if you are moving through water or air that itself moves in varying directions at varying speeds that you cannot measure reliably (example: human sailors sailing from the north coast of Spain into the English Channel sometimes managed to end up west of Land's End (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_170...)
Homing pigeons, for example, are better at finding their home if they have had time to fly around in its wider neighborhood. That way, if their imperfect navigation methods bring them somewhere 30 miles from home, they recognize the location and get home from there.
For homing pigeons, smell also has been mentioned as something they use to get home.
It also wouldn't surprise me if homing pigeons living near the center of Paris became better at getting home after the Eiffel Tower was built.
2) using the law of large numbers. Not all animals need to return for migration to be a success for the species.
1) The article claims, the conference thinks you're wrong.
"This marked a change from previous years, Richard Nissen, a member of the Institute, told me, when a range of other navigation aids were part of the discussion: landmarks, olfactory cues, memory, genetics, polarized light, celestial objects. “Everyone now seems completely sold on the idea that animal navigation is based on magnetism,” Nissen said. Human-centric as it sounds, most of the conference’s attendees believe that animals possess a kind of compass."
When humans get lost it's only memory and random walking, it's a good theory animals only have one more enhancement, small memory cues, magnetic and randomness.
My father had a pretty good innate sense of direction. He just said it was a feeling, and he could cross-check with the sun, etc., if available- but could do pretty well without it. He said he was pretty old when he realized that not everybody could do that. Perhaps it's not totally gone from humans.
"one more enhancement" is not the same as "only use their compass", and "small memory cues" is what is called a mental map (those do not have to be complete, and can be very sketchy) in the literature.
Dead reckoning using only a compass does you little good if you integrate over days (or more: for migrating animals, integration period would be months), more so if you are moving through water or air that itself moves in varying directions at varying speeds that you cannot measure reliably (example: human sailors sailing from the north coast of Spain into the English Channel sometimes managed to end up west of Land's End (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_170...)
Homing pigeons, for example, are better at finding their home if they have had time to fly around in its wider neighborhood. That way, if their imperfect navigation methods bring them somewhere 30 miles from home, they recognize the location and get home from there.
For homing pigeons, smell also has been mentioned as something they use to get home.
It also wouldn't surprise me if homing pigeons living near the center of Paris became better at getting home after the Eiffel Tower was built.
2) using the law of large numbers. Not all animals need to return for migration to be a success for the species.