The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Polarized Light Cues Underlie Compass Calibration in Migratory Songbirds
Abstract
Migratory songbirds use the geomagnetic field, stars, the Sun, and polarized light patterns to determine their migratory direction. To prevent navigational errors, it is necessary to calibrate all of these compass systems to a common reference. We show that migratory Savannah sparrows use polarized light cues from the region of sky near the horizon to recalibrate the magnetic compass at both sunrise and sunset. We suggest that skylight polarization patterns are used to derive an absolute (i.e., geographic) directional system that provides the primary calibration reference for all of the compasses of migratory songbirds.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Anthropogenic electromagnetic noise disrupts magnetic compass orientation in a migratory bird
Engels, S., Schneider, N.-L., Lefeldt, N., Hein, C. M., Zapka, M., Michalik, A., Elbers, D., Kittel, A., Hore, P. J., & Mouritsen, H. (2014) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature13290 · Cited by 403
Metadata
- Authors
- Muheim, R., Phillips, J. B., & Åkesson, S.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2006-08-11
- Volume
- 313
- Issue
- 5788
- Pages
- 837-839
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2136994271
- Cited by
- 288
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 8.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Polarized Light Cues Underlie Compass Calibration in Migratory Songbirds. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1129709
- The paper
- Muheim, R., Phillips, J. B., & Åkesson, S. (2006). Polarized Light Cues Underlie Compass Calibration in Migratory Songbirds. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1129709
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
