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Study

Evidence for a navigational map stretching across the continental U.S. in a migratory songbird

Thorup, Kasper; Bisson, Isabelle-Anne; Bowlin, Melissa S.; Holland, Richard A.; Wikelski, Martin

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007

Peer-reviewedfield experimentwild

What they did

White-crowned sparrows caught on migration in Washington State were flown to New Jersey, released, and followed from aircraft with radio telemetry, with adults and first-year birds compared.

Studied in
Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii
Sample size
adult and juvenile white-crowned sparrows displaced and radio-tracked

What they found

Adults corrected for the displacement and headed towards their normal wintering range; juveniles continued in the direction they had been travelling before capture.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Experienced birds possess a navigational map covering a continental scale, and inexperienced birds do not: their first migration runs on a compass heading alone.

How NatureHQ reads it

Perdeck’s 1958 result, repeated with telemetry instead of ringing recoveries and therefore able to watch the correction happen rather than infer it from where birds turned up. The age split is the whole finding: the same species contains both a map-user and a compass-follower, depending on whether it has made the journey before.

Limitations

  • Small samples, as aircraft-based tracking forces.
  • Shows that a map exists; it does not identify what the map is made of.

The experiment, explained

  • Flying sparrows across a continent and following them by aeroplane

    Does a migrating bird know where it is, or only which way it was going? And does the answer depend on age?

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesPublished in PNAS.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0704734104

Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.