The increased use of mobile phones is ruffling the feathers of racing-pigeon fanciers. The racing pigeon fraternity is a-flutter with suspicions that mobile phone technology is upsetting the birds' internal biological compasses and sending them off course.
The president of the 450-member Irish North Road National Flying Club, Mr Tony Kehoe, says racing pigeon-fanciers are worried that radio waves emitted by mobile phone masts may be interfering with the pigeons' homing instinct processes.
"Pigeons navigate through using the sun and the magnetic fields of the Earth," he said. "There may be a problem with mobile phones, there's so much equipment going through the air now."
Whether the mobile phone theory is anything more than a case of fanciers setting the cat among the pigeons cannot be established due to a lack of scientific evidence.
But the secretary of the New Ross and District Pigeon Club, Mr Jim Power, said he has noticed that the problem of lost birds has worsened as satellite television and the mobile telecommunications network in the State have developed.
Mr Power says membership of his club has fallen drastically over the past three years due to heavy losses of birds, which cost between £40 and more than £1,000.
While he blamed increases in the number of falcons for some of these losses, Mr Power said many pigeon-fanciers were speculating that mobile phones "must be having a bearing on it".
It is not known exactly how racing pigeons find their bases, but it is generally accepted that they rely partly on the Earth's magnetic field for compass orientation, as well as sight.
Pigeons and other migratory animals such as dolphins and whales have internal biological compasses composed of the mineral magnetite wrapped in bundles of nerve cells.
It is believed these natural magnetic particles, which are stored in the heads and necks of pigeons, are responsible for their sensitivity to magnetism.
While this is probably not their primary method of navigation, there have been many pigeon race smashes - when only a small percentage of birds return home from a release site - during naturally occurring geomagnetic storms.
UCG's Professor of Applied Sciences, Philip Walton, is, however, fast to clip the wings of the mobile phone theory.
He said: "I would regard it as very unlikely because the power of the radio waves from these transmitters is very small compared to television or radio transmitters, which have been around since the 1930s and 1940s. I would think that putting phone masts on a hill would be much more upsetting to the birds from a visual point of view."
Spokeswomen for Eircell and East Digifone also said the pigeon theory was little more than a flight of fancy.
"Perhaps the pigeons are all heading off to our 80 roaming partner countries in search of warmer climates," said the Eircell spokeswoman.
Mobile phones work by using radio waves to link to masts on radio base stations. The base stations in turn are linked to the switching stations, which together make up a mobile network.
The radio in a mobile handset emits electromagnetic signals or microwaves, similar to those in a microwave oven.
Scientific research on the environmental impact of mobile phones is scant, but concerns have been voiced about the siting of mobile phone masts, which opponents say pose a silent health risk to humans from the non-ionising radiation they give off.