The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration. Bernd Heinrich

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       Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we possess the last word that a gnat has to say to us.

      — Jean-Henri Fabre

      CHARLES DARWIN REFERRED TO THE ACCOUNT OF FERDINAND von Wrangel’s Arctic explorations, The Expedition to North Siberia, concerning how we home, quoting von Wrangel on how the Siberians oriented by “a sort of ‘dead reckoning’ which is chiefly affected by eyesight, but partly, perhaps, by the sense of muscular movement, in the same manner that a man with his eyes closed can proceed (and some men much better than others) for a short distance in a nearly straight line, or turn at right angles and back again.” Darwin compared a bird’s homing capability with that of people, but much less favorably, by telling how John James Audubon kept a wild pinioned goose in confinement, which at migration time became “extremely restless, like all other migratory birds under such circumstances; and at last it escaped. The poor creature immediately began its long journey on foot, but its sense of direction seemed to have been perverted, for instead of traveling due southward, it proceeded in exactly the wrong direction, due northward.” I’m not the least surprised at the behavior of the goose but all the more puzzled by our own orienting, which involves knowledge versus a feeling of “sense of direction.” I recall instances of waking up in “total” dark, “knowing” in my mind precisely how I am oriented relative to the room and hence the rest of my environment, but irked by “feeling” that I am in the precise opposite direction. It is then a struggle to get the two to agree, which happens only after some effort.

      In Darwin’s time it was still supposed that humans had overall superiority over other animals. His then-hypothesis (later theory, and now fact) of evolution, which now binds us all as kin, was still revolutionary. Darwin found the goose’s behavior puzzling because he could not know that geese, cranes, and swans stay together in family and larger groups and that although the young by themselves do not know the correct migration route, they learn to know it from their parents which in turn learned it from theirs. Other birds have their migratory directions genetically coded, and they go strictly by “feeling,” since many of these have no knowledge because they migrate ahead of their parents.

      We humans get lost easily. We would not get far without reference to landmarks, and I base that conjecture on (inadvertent) experiments. In one I was in long-familiar woods and got caught in a heavy snowstorm. Suddenly I got “turned around,” and it seemed as if all landmarks had in almost one instant been erased. But I kept going, trying to maintain a straight line by trusting my “sense of direction.” When I thought I had reached a place that I knew, where I should be going downhill, the landscape was instead sloping upward, and the brook I had expected to see was going in the “wrong” direction. At that point, knowing I was lost and no longer referencing to any signal, I backtracked in the snow and discovered that I had been walking in a circle, all the while thinking I was heading in the “right” direction. Yes, we can walk, a short way, in a relatively straight line with our eyes closed, by a process dubbed “path integration,” but my emphasis here is on “relatively.” Mice may do better. A friend told me of catching a Mexican jumping mouse in a live trap baited with peanuts. It had a kink in its tail, so he called it Crooked Tail, or CT for short. After he had released it several times, and it always returned for another snack of peanuts at the same source, he finally decided to “test its mettle” and released it exactly one kilometer away in thick brush and grass. The next morning CT was back for another snack. After release from two kilometers, though, it did not return. We don’t know, though, if this was due to failed navigation, finding a new food, a cost/benefit calculation, or a run-in with a coyote, owl, or weasel. On the other hand, when I failed to navigate, I was positive that I had been going in the precise opposite direction, which meant I had no sense of direction whatsoever, except that coming from visual landmarks from which I had constructed a map in my head.

      When we do home, it is by maintaining a constantly updated calculation from at least two reference points, and the motivation to use them. We are innate homebodies, normally seldom displaced, so that in our evolutionary history there has been little need for a highly developed home-orienting mechanism. Simply paying attention to familiar landmarks suffices. Males on average may perform better than females in negotiating unknown territory, and it is posited that they, having been hunters traditionally, have a better “sense of direction.” But I doubt it. Learning, and especially attention, is hugely important for a presumed directional sense that can be developed to a high degree, as shown in some Polynesian seafarers living on isolated islands. But basically that involves being alert to more cues. These seafarers had been trained from near infancy to “read” the stars, the ocean waves, the winds, and other signs so that they may navigate over vast stretches of open ocean. But what a select few human navigators can accomplish with experience and with tools, many insects and birds do routinely as a matter of course, and with far greater precision over distances that span the globe.

      Every fall and spring billions of birds travel to their wintering grounds where they can find food, and in the spring they return to near where they were born in order to nest. In huge tides, partially aided by favorable winds but mostly by their own muscle power, they ply the skies in the day and at night in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, sometimes covering thousands of kilometers in a few days. For the most part, the birds have pinpoint home destinations, places such as a specific woodlot, field, or hedge. In the fall they reverse their journey, though often by a different route, again to reach specific pinpoints in their winter homes. Turtles on the seas accomplish the same navigation feats between breeding and feeding areas.

      The magnitude of birds’ migratory performances staggers our imagination, in terms of both physical exertion and feats of navigation, because they are vastly superior to anything we could, as individuals, accomplish. Bird migration, as we now understand it, for centuries seemed impossible because we used ourselves as the standard, and that of turtles was not even considered. The animals’ performances would still seem impossible, given our ignorance and arrogance, were it not for the proof from countless research experiments.

      The homing behavior of birds was known and used as early as 218 BC, when Roman foot soldiers captured swallows nesting at military headquarters and took them with them on their campaigns. They put threads on the swallows’ legs with various numbers of knots to specify perhaps some prearranged signal or information, so that the marked bird when released and then recaptured at its home nest would bring the message. Today, between 1.1 and 1.2 million birds are banded annually in America alone, providing an ever more detailed picture of where the different species travel and when.

      As with insect dispersals/migrations, our attention and insights into bird homing were and still are stimulated by spectacular examples. We are perhaps most impressed, if not baffled, not only by the birds’ wondrous physical capacities, but also by the cognitive or mental capacities that underlie them. Seafaring animals, like albatrosses and shearwaters and sea turtles, are especially noteworthy to us because we can’t explain their behavior by the use of at least to us visible landmarks, our main if not only recourse.

      The Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus, navigating over the vast oceans, was СКАЧАТЬ