Mechanisms of landmark use in mammals and birds

Many animals face the problem of returning to a place that they have visited before. The place may be a home, a food site or a nest for one’s offspring. The female digger wasp, for example, digs nests in the ground in which she lays eggs. The future larvae must be provisioned with food, and thus the wasp faces the problem of returning to her nests after foraging for food. For the digger wasp, reproductive success depends heavily on place finding. Food-storing birds must return to a number of places at which they have stored food (see Sherry and Healy, Chapter 8). And any home-based animal that ever ventures forth faces the problem of returning home. Diverse place-finding mechanisms are thus commonly found in the animal kingdom.