I draw your attention to a recent paper by Jon Hagstrum on the possible role of infrasound in homing pigeon navigation, which appeared recently in the Journal of Experimental Biology. This story was reported in many articles in the popular press, for instance, BBC News.

This story has many Cornell connections. Hagstrum graduated from Cornell as a geology major in 1976. He was inspired to consider geophysical influences on homing by a talk given by Professor William T. Keeton of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior (in whose honor the Keeton House was named). From 1967 until 1980, Keeton ran the largest and most prestigious research center in the world for exploring pigeon navigation.

The fact that pigeons can detect infrasound was established at Cornell by the late Melvin Kreithen, Ph.D. ’75, and Douglas Quine, Ph.D. ’79, who was a doctoral student of Keeton's and who made infrasound detection the topic of his dissertation.

After Keeton died unexpectedly in 1980 (while hosting the end of season party for his research group), Professor Steve Emlen obtained a grant to transfer all Keeton's orientation data to a computer database. This database supplied all of the orientation data for Hagstrum's paper. This in itself is rather astounding. After 30-plus years, Keeton's research data has taken on new life fostering the formation of new hypotheses about orientation.

After Keeton's death, pigeon orientation research at Cornell was continued for several years by Professor Charles Walcott.

I worked for Keeton during the 1970s and was one of several people involved in creating the database. For many years, the data were available as a text file. In 2006, I wrote a Macintosh program to serve as a front end to the database, and it was this program that Hagstrum used when doing his analysis.

All in all, this is a wonderful Cornell story and a testimony to legacy of Bill Keeton, a world-class scientist and a great teacher, who revolutionized the teaching of biology through his course Bio 101 and textbook, "Biology," which according to Wikipedia, "was one of the first that integrated zoology and botany and sought common themes, guided by the process of evolution."

— Tim Larkin ’71, MFA ’78, M.A. ’83; IT support, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology