How birds and other creatures migrate has obsessed mankind for millennia. The popular science writer Bernd Heinrich would, I imagined, survey the extent of modern knowledge on the subject, albeit with digressions on other topics, in his new book. An author well-known for combining natural history professionalism with the common touch, he would surely be the one to combine instruction with entertainment.
I last reviewed a book of his, The Nesting Season, four years ago [Taipei Times, Nov. 21, 2010] and was astonished to find him arguing that the extent of time birds, animals and by extension, humans feel an exclusive sexual attraction to one partner is around 28 months. After that what he called “nest loyalty” largely takes over in keeping couples together.
This time round, Heinrich again displays a tendency to relate behavior in the wild to human behavior even in large cities, and The Homing Instinct is all the more readable because of it.
Heinrich’s parents migrated to the US from Germany in 1951 and settled in Maine, finding an echo there of their previous life in the West German woods. Despite studying and then teaching in California, Bernd Heinrich experienced an attachment to his childhood home, and has now returned to live there. “I didn’t know it then,” he writes, “but my life would mirror that of the albatross and the young salmon that leave their homes to roam, and return as adults to their imprinted home or to the close vicinity of it.”
This is all very intriguing. The problem, however, is that in this book, unambiguously entitled The Homing Instinct: The Story and Science of Migration, there is very little indeed on the ostensible subject.
I read the book carefully, and then thumbed back through the chapters to check that I wasn’t mistaken. But the reality remains what I suspected — there’s little about migration as such anywhere in the book.
It’s true that it opens with a description of cranes arriving back in Alaska after a winter further south, and Heinrich watching them by a still frozen lake from a friend’s cabin. He then proceeds to bees making their way back to their hives, even when they’ve been moved some kilometers from their original points of departure. Next is a chapter on butterflies, moths and various bugs including ladybirds, with some information on migratory aids, though not a whole lot.
There then follows a chapter entitled “By the Sun, Stars, and Magnetic Compass.” This sounded as if it was going to get to the heart of the matter, but it was in reality merely a summarizing of the work of some of the most prominent early researchers into the migration phenomenon. The reader still awaits, in other words, a resume of the full state of modern knowledge on the subject.
We never get any of this. Maybe the truth is that scientists still don’t really know how birds, bugs and animals migrate — or at best the consensus, in the absence of any grand overarching theory, is that numerous kinds of methods are used.
By turning this way and that, Bernd Heinrich gradually wriggles out of confronting the book’s stated subject. For instance, first we read about how some creatures, even salmon, are led by scent, or can be led by scent, when tracing the location of their original home rivers. Then we learn how solitary bumblebees and highly social honeybees take great pains to select the ideal spot for their homes.
There is then an account of the building of these honeybees’ homes, which is followed by an unrelated account of a trip to Surinam. By his point the reader is beginning to abandon all hope of ever getting to the bottom of the migration problem.
Then comes a description of the biology of the various insects that have made their homes in his summer cabin in the woods, plus an extended chapter on an orb web spider of which Heinrich has made special study. Migration is now almost forgotten by the reader, and certainly, it seems, by the author.
The book draws to its conclusion with an account of two extraordinary mass extinctions, those of the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, once the most abundant insect on the Great Plains, and the passenger pigeon, slaughtered to extinction due to its very habit of staying in a gigantic if ever-moving flock. These birds had no fixed homes, merely pausing on their travels to breed over a five or six week period, thus providing ideal targets for hunters equipped with nets and “stool pigeons”, birds fixed on perches to attract the huge main flock. The New York meat market sometimes received a hundred barrels of pigeons a day prior to the birds’ final extinction in 1914.
This is all very interesting, but what about migration? I’m frankly none the wiser after reading this book, which is hardly surprising because there’s so little on its declared subject anywhere in it.
Otherwise though, it’s a good enough read. Heinrich is clearly an equable and good-natured person, and it comes across in his writing. But a comprehensive explanation of how the myriad creatures of the globe migrate simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps the reason for this is that still, to this day, nobody really knows the answer.
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