Why Do Pigeons Shake Their Heads?

In 1978, a group of researchers gathered in a laboratory at Queen’s University in Canada around a mill surrounded by pigeons. The goal behind this comic scene was to try to answer the age-old question: Why do pigeons shake their heads? The swaying of the head of the pigeon is a characteristic of the identity of the pigeon. It may be that the desire of the pigeons to flock to us is a sign that a meal is being provided for it. The pigeons seem to shake their heads while stumbling while picking up crumbs from the ground, as if they were all attending a silent disco in the town square, but what is the point? What’s really behind this movement?

The 1978 mill experiment gave us our first fundamental insight into this question, and the study overturned one key assumption in the process. Pigeons don’t actually shake their heads. Instead, they push them forward. When the researchers in this study reviewed slow-motion footage, they found that there was actually There are two main parts to the pigeon’s head movement, which scientists called the thrust and braking phase. Michael Land, a biologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom who studied eye movements in animals and humans, explained that in the thrusting phase, the head is pushed forward in relation to the body by about 5 centimeters (about two inches), and this is followed by the braking phase. During which the head remains in space, which means that the head moves backwards relative to the body moving forwards.

What we see as a head shake is actually the head smoothly sliding forward and then waiting for the body to catch up, and we view it as a shake because the movement unfolds so quickly, said Aaron Blaisdel, a psychology professor who studies zoology including pigeons at the University of California, Los Angeles. For Life Sciences, this happens on average five to eight times per second as a pigeon walks. And that’s quick enough, for us, we’re not processing it as the actual event is unfolding and our minds are treating it like a head shake, so all this time, we’ve been making fun of the pigeons for their weird walk, and it turns out we were seeing that the wrong way, and the reason why the pigeons are doing this behavior. As it turns out, that’s how these birds see the world.

Visual processing in pigeons:

In the historic mill experiment, researchers discovered that if a pigeon’s visual surroundings remained relatively constant, the pigeons would not shake their heads. Through reverse logic, this led to the central discovery that head movement helps pigeons stabilize their view of the moving world around them. Land said that keeping a pigeon’s head suspended in space During braking phases means the image won’t be blurred by movement. In other words, a fixed head gives the pigeon a moment to visually process its surroundings while it waits for its moving body to catch up. This tactic is useful because it enables the pigeon to see potential food and possibly enemies, Land said.

Blaisdell explained that if a pigeon’s head moved at the same speed as their body, they would have difficulty maintaining a stable image of the world on their retinas, and the surrounding scene would float in a disorienting blur. This optical illusion isn’t just an obsession in the life of a pigeon. Humans do a version of this too, except that instead of… By moving our heads, we use fast, jerky movements of our eyeballs to help fix our vision as we move.

Our eyes do not move smoothly and continuously, Blaisdell said. They jump from one place to another. This is called the blinking eye movement. Once the eye reaches the end point of the blinking eye movement, it holds together for a short period, which is long enough to fix the image of the world on the retina so that we can This is the blinking movement you see in someone’s eyes as they view a scene outside the window of a fast-moving train. Pigeons’ eyes can move like ours, but pigeons also have a more mobile head than humans, so it makes sense that they evolved by being pushed as a more effective tool. To stabilize vision.