How do birds migrate such long distances? Scientists decode the enigma

As the winter season began in India in late 2020, over 100 species of birds flocked from across the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of food and nestlings. Birds likely use magnetically sensitive proteins called cryptochromes located in their retinas that enable sensing and signalling functions, helping them in navigating these long distances. "It looks possible - and I would put it no stronger than that at the moment - that these highly-specialised chemical reactions could give the bird information about the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and in that way constitute a magnetic compass," Professor PJ Hore of the University of Oxford told BBC. MAGNETIC PROTEINS IN BIRDS Previous studies on migratory Robins have shown that the Cryptochromes is located in the outer segments of two types of photoreceptor cell in the retina, which is an ideal location for receiving the light that would excite cryptochromes and thus aid magnetic sensing. Just like birds, CRY4 is also found in amphibians that have been documented to use the magnetic field to travel through the vast reaches of the oceans.