The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration

图书信息

作者	Bernd Heinrich
出版社	William Collins
ISBN	9780007594061
出版时间	2014-08-14
字数	51.4万
分类	进口书,外文原版书,法律,政治,宗教

读书简介

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.

目录

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

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