How Do Bar-Headed Geese Manage to Migrate Over The Himalaya?
Imagine a woman riding a motor scooter down the street while flanked by a large bird flying almost cheek to beak with her. Could this be a harrowing scene from that famous Hitchcock horror movie, "The Birds? No: it's a carefully planned scene from an ongoing research project on a species of bird, the bar-headed goose, that is led by Jessica Meir of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. Meir is studying bar-headed geese for their special abilities: they manage to migrate over the Himalaya--conquering the cold, wind and low oxygen conditions of the mountains--while travelling between their winter feeding grounds in southern Asia and their summer breeding grounds in the Central Asian Highlands.
Provided by the National Science Foundation