The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
The story and science of how animals find their way home.Home is the place we long for most, when we feel we have travelled too far, for too long. Since boyhood, acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year to a beloved patch of woods in his native western Maine. But while it’s the pull of nostalgia that informs our desire to go back, what is it that drives the homing instinct in animals?Heinrich explores the fascinating science behind the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory over impossible distances; how the subtlest of scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home; and how the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over vast distances. Most movingly, Heinrich chronicles the spring return of a pair of sandhill cranes to their pond in the Alaska tundra. With his marvellously evocative prose, Heinrich portrays the psychological state of the newly arrived birds, articulating just what their yearly return truly means, to the birds and to those fortunate enough to witness this transcendently beautiful ritual.The Homing Instinct is an enchanting study of this phenomenon of the natural world, reminding us that to discount our own feelings toward home is to ignore biology itself.
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Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014.
First published in hardback in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014.
Text and illustrations copyright © Bernd Heinrich 2014
Cover photograph © Antagain / Getty Images
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007594054
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007594061
Version: 2015-04-22
CONTENTS
By the Sun, Stars, and Magnetic Compass
II. HOME-MAKING AND MAINTAINING
Charlotte II: A Home Within a Home
ABOUT A DECADE AGO I STARTED PULLING TOGETHER BITS and pieces on the “homing” topic and in 2011 had a book manuscript scheduled for publication. I was then living at “camp” in Maine, where I had done my fieldwork on bumblebees for years; lately my work involved feeding ravens with cow carcasses in the winter, and I then got interested in beetles that bury mouse carcasses in the summer. Soon the topic of recycling of animal carcasses of all sorts seemed more urgent than the scheduled book about getting to and living in a particular place. So, I put writing about homing on hold. By the time I again picked up my pencil, it seemed as though everything I thought of or had an interest in had, in one way or another, started to have a bearing on home and homing. In the meantime I had also been confronting personal issues of “homing,” and they seemed to take on increasingly similar forms to what I was reading about in animals.
I had already left my academic position in Vermont and wanted to return home to live in Maine, possibly in the home to which I had bonded strongly as a child. I had planted a row of trees there about thirty-five years ago. Those trees, now huge, brought back many memories related to them. They reminded me of my father, who had liked them, probably because he had strong feelings for a row of chestnut trees that also lined the way to his old home in the old country that he had often talked about. Because I had written a book about my father, and not also one about my sisters or my mother, I had come into the disfavor of both. There had been parent-offspring conflict before my mother died, and then the house stood empty. So then there was also sibling rivalry over the estate. It seemed like being in a real-life situation of the sociobiology theories, in an almost perfect rendition of a naked mole rat colony where one of the family finds a big tuber, and the others claim it as theirs, and then a vocally assertive member establishes herself as the matriarch. I realized then that the difference between what can happen to a human and to a naked mole rat family is mainly one of terminology. This thus provided the topic of home and homing a much wider perspective.
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn to where we came from.
— Eric Hoffer
With all things and in all things, we are relatives.
— Native American (Sioux) proverb
I LEANED ON THE SHIP’S RAILING AT THE STERN, A TEN-YEAR-OLD boy with virtually no notion of where my family might be going. I heard the deep roar of the engines, the whine of the wind, and the rush of the churning water. I felt adrift, as though carried along like a leaf in a storm, feeling the rocking, the spray, and the endlessness and power of the waves. I had no notion that we were among multitudes who had made hard decisions to court the great unknown, or any clear idea of why my family had left the only home I’d known in a forest in Germany. The only picture of what our new home might be was that we might find magical hummingbirds, and fierce native tribes armed with knives, bows and arrows, spears, and tomahawks.
Security for me was the memory of where we had come from, specifically a little cabin in the woods and a cozy arbor of green leaves that enclosed me like a cocoon where I could see out but nobody could see in. It meant a feeling of kinship with the tiny brown wren with an upright stubby tail that sang so exuberantly near its snug feather-lined nest of green moss hidden under the upturned roots of a tree in a dark forest. I had in idle moments in my mind inhabited that nest. I found, too, the nest of an equally tiny long-tailed tit. This little bird’s home was almost invisible to the eye because it was camouflaged with lichens that matched those on the thick fork of a tall alder tree where it was placed.
