o you ever wonder how birds stay cool on hot summer days? We at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service want to share some insights! Like people, birds can withstand changes in the weather and maintain their body temperature whether it’s hot or cold outside, but there are limits. When summer temperatures are on the rise, birds depend on adaptations to keep from overheating.

Many adaptations are different variations of thermoregulation, the mechanism that warm-blooded animals use to balance their body temperature with their surroundings. Thermoregulation is a process where warmer blood cools and then circulates throughout the body, lowering the animal’s overall body temperature. It can take many forms and is a window into understanding how our physical world works. To understand how birds have adapted these cooling techniques, we need a quick overview of how thermal energy - or heat - moves from one thing to another. Simply put, heat moves in one direction, from hot toward cold. The movement of heat happens on a molecular level in all matter, whether it’s solid, liquid or gas. It’s within this principle that birds are able to transfer their body temperature to cooler air and water around them.

One thing led to another, and in 1965, Keeton — then a professor of biology at Cornell University — was strapping magnets to pigeons. Because previous studies had shown that some animals align their bodies to magnetic fields, Keeton hypothesized that this was important for navigation. He was correct. The polarized pigeons were clumsy navigators at best. Smarter faster: the Big Think newsletter Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday Fields marked with an * are required

Over the next several decades, researchers investigated how migratory birds detect magnetic fields. In general, most scientists rejected the idea that birds hid a compass under their wings. That, of course, would be silly. The compass, or rather a magnetically sensitive protein, was hidden in the birds’ eyes and brain.

At first glance, that seems to be the end of the story: Birds navigate by magnetic fields, and they have a special protein that allows them to detect magnetic fields. However, one question lingers: How do the birds translate a magnetic field into direction? This is what the scientists behind the recent study hoped the streaked shearwater chick could answer.