A synopsis of Kateřina Benediktová, Jana Adámková, et al., (2020) Magnetic alignment enhances homing efficiency of hunting dogs eLife 9:e55080 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55080

Hunting dogs, scent hounds in particular, have been selected over generations to pursue game and return to their owners, often over distances of hundreds or thousands of meters through dense vegetation. Benediktováa and her colleagues at the Czech University of Life Sciences wanted to better understand how this happens.
When returning to their owners, dogs can find their way by ‘tracking’, that is, following their own scent trail, or they can perform true navigation. True navigation, referred to as ‘scouting’ in this paper, requires the dog to have a mental map of an area, often over long distances, without relying on route-based landmarks. Scouting allows the dogs to return quickly by taking shortcuts but runs a higher risk of the dog ending up in the wrong place if they fail to navigate correctly.
To determine whether dogs were relying on tracking or scouting, they equipped 27 hunting dogs with GPS collars and action cams, let them freely roam in forested areas, and analyzed components of homing in over 600 trials. The trials took place at 62 locations in forested hunting grounds in the Czech Republic from 2014 through 2017. They noted that the dense forest vegetation at these sites would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the dogs to find their owners by site.
In 399 cases (59.4 %), dogs homed by following their outbound track (tracking strategy), and in 223 cases (33.2 %), dogs homed using novel route (scouting strategy). In 50 cases (8.0 %), dogs combined both strategies during a single return. As predicted, scouting dogs were faster than tracking ones, and they were able to show this was due to a shorter return path and not the shoulder height of the dogs. They found that neither sex nor breed effected tracking versus scouting.
They were also able to show that scouting dogs will perform something they called a ‘compass run’ before returning to their owners at the starting point of the excursion. The scouting dogs consistently aligned the start of their return along the north-south magnetic axis. In tracking dogs, the returns started in random directions. This ‘compass run’ along the north-south magnetic axis did not depend on the location of the start point relative to where the dogs were when they decided to return, nor did it depend on the relative direction of the owner. They also tested for possible effects of wind direction, position of the sun, or prior experience at the site on the direction of the compass run, but none of these proved to be well correlated.
Based on these results and other studies showing that dogs are sensitive to magnetic cues, they concluded that dogs, like many species of birds, insects, and other mammals, are capable of using the Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation.