Ruth Rosin: Sorry, but I will not waste any time reading the studies you  provided, because I am not interested in the research that is done by scientists who start from the groundless premise that migrating Monarchs know they should go to Mexico, and how to get there, for which there has never been any experimental evidence.

 

Jay R. Feierman: I believe I posted about 9 things about Monarch butterfly migration. I don't presume the authors started from any premise. These are inductive, empirical studies. If you don't read material that is counter to what you believe, you will meet the stereotype of someone who rather believes than knows. In contrast, I ordered the two books you recommended on Schneirla' school of thought specifically because I want to broaden my knowledge base. In my opinion you would benefit from reading the 9 items I posted on Monarch butterfly migration and address specifically what you think is in error in them. I also posted a few full length papers and chapters on the same topic. It is an open question of what is the mechanisms by which the Monarchs know where to migrate to in a very small area in Mexico. The studies in a laboratory wind chamber were aimed at seeing if the birds would fly with different angles to the light if they were phase advanced or phase delayed before then went into the wind chamber. The experiment showed that you could change the direction they flew in relationship to the light by phase advancing or phase delaying their circadian pacemaker. In my opinion that is very high quality scientific research.

 

When I was a teenager a baby robin who had fallen out of its nest. We put the robin in a bird cage and took turns hand feeding the robin until it became an adult red breasted robin. I remember the day when it was about 3 or 4 months old that we decided to let it loose from the cage we kept it in. When we opened the cage, it flew out the first time with no trouble at all. It went up into a tree for a few minutes and then came back down and landed on top of the cage with us all standing around. We left the cage outside and for the remainder of the summer it would come back at times to sit on top of the cage. When it did it, we could pick it up. If we held our hand out, it would hop onto our hand. That's not the most interesting thing. In the early fall around September, we wondered if it would fly south with the rest of the robins. We did not see this robin (who we called "Robby") in October to May. However, one day in May I was standing outside our house with my sister, who at the time was about 7 years old. All of a sudden a robin flew out of the sky and landed on her head. We all said "Robby"? I went over to it and put out my hand and it hopped onto my hand like it used to do. For the rest of that summer, it would occasionally come to our house and land on our hands if we held them out. It went south again that year and we never saw the bird again. However, we have some wonderful still pictures and 8 mm movie film, including movie film when it came back from its winter migration the first year and landed on my sister's head. The question is how (by what mechanism) this bird knew how to find our house again? The little naturalistic experiment also showed that if you handle a wild animal before a certain critical age, it will become your "friend" and come to you. The same principle holds for domestic cats and dogs. We used to have barn cats that lived in our barn and ate mice who were there eating the grain the horses didn't eat. When the barn cats had kittens, if we did not pick up the kittens regularly before about 3 months of age, we could never pick them up as adults. So the robin story has two themes.