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

      Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      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

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

I. HOMING

Cranes Coming Home

Beelining

Getting to a Good Place

By the Sun, Stars, and Magnetic Compass

       Smelling Their Way Home

       Picking the Spot

       II. HOME-MAKING AND MAINTAINING

       Architectures of Home

       Home-making in Suriname

       Home Crashers

       Charlotte II: A Home Within a Home

       The Communal Home

       III. HOMING IMPLICATIONS

       The In and Out of Boundaries

       Of Trees, Rocks, a Bear, and a Home

       On Home Ground

       Fire, Hearth, and Home

       Homing to the Herd

       Epilogue

       Further Reading

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       Books by Bernd Heinrich

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      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,