A team of researchers has determined that noise from man-made electronics disrupts the internal compass of songbirds:
The team laboriously erected a grounded aluminium cage around the robins’ hut and connected it to an electrical supply. When the birds were exposed to background electromagnetic noise in their unscreened huts, they flew in random directions. When the Faraday cage was on, their compass started working again. “It was like flipping a switch,” says [researcher Henrik] Mouritsen.
It was an astonishing result, and one that Mouritsen knew he needed to check carefully. As he writes, “seemingly implausible effects require stronger proof’’. Many small studies have claimed that man-made electric and magnetic fields could affect animal biology and human health, and many people have anecdotally claimed that they’re highly sensitive to such fields. But whenever scientists investigate those claims through proper experiments—double-blind trials with a large sample size—the effects vanish. (Here’s a good PDF summary of the evidence.) …
This has nothing to do with wi-fi, mobile phones, or power lines. By deliberately adding electromagnetic fields inside the grounded huts, the team showed that they were sensitive to frequencies between 2 kilohertz and 5 megahertz. With that range, the culprits are likely to be either AM radio signals or fields produced by electronic equipment in the university, although it’s hard to narrow the source down any further.
The Dish 