Tory Stephenson, with the help of her pigeon “Speckles” aka “Speck-Man”, won the overall medallion in her school’s fourth grade science fair with her project titled “Flight Time.” For her project, Tory wanted to determine if weather conditions played a factor in the amount of time it took one of her birds to get home from a 17-mile release. She advanced to District competition and won 1st Place and then 2nd Place at Regionals!
From her project:
From the results of my experiment, I learned that it appears temperatures between 24 degrees and 68 degrees do not have an effect on the birds. There wasn’t much precipitation during our experiment so we can’t tell if it affects the birds. Our data suggests that when the wind is coming from the south (tail winds) the birds would come home faster than when the wind is coming from the north (head wind). The air pressure between 29.85 and 30.26 didn’t seem to effect the pigeons. Extreme weather conditions quite possibly would effect the pigeons but we didn’t experience any extreme conditions. The birds flew a route home from the same release point every time. They may have learned the route home to become faster.
