Shearwaters know the direction and distance home but fail to encode intervening obstacles after free-ranging foraging trips

While displacement experiments have been powerful for determining the sensory basis of homing navigation in birds, they have left unresolved important cognitive aspects of navigation such as what birds know about their location relative to home and the anticipated route. Here, we analyze the free-ranging Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks of a large sample ( n = 707) of Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus , foraging trips to investigate, from...