Why Pigeons Don't Crash: a Mystery of Cityscapes Explained

Birds don't seem all that smart. Despite being experts in the air, flying better than anything humanity has ever constructed, they still collide with a stunning number of cars and planes. Past studies have even revealed that a whopping 340 million birds have fatal run-ins with windshields annually. And yet, pigeons seem to never hit a single telephone pole, cable, flag post, or anything else a cityscape can throw at them. How can this be? A new study of mid-flight behavior has the answer.