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The homing instinct : meaning & mystery in animal migration / Bernd Heinrich.

by Heinrich, Bernd, 1940-

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Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

9780544484016 (paperback)

xv, 352 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Homing. Cranes coming home ; Beelining ; Getting to a good place ; By the sun, stars, and magnetic compass ; Smelling their way home ; Picking the spot -- Home-making and maintaining. Architectures of home ; Home-making in Suriname ; Home crashers ; Charlotte II : a home within a home ; The communal home -- 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.

Acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year since boyhood to a beloved patch of western Maine woods. What is the biology in humans of this deep in the bones pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing? Heinrich explores the fascinating science chipping away at the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home if they are displaced from it; 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 home pond in the Alaska tundra. With his trademark "marvelous, mind altering" prose (Los Angeles Times), he portrays the unmistakable signs of deep psychological emotion in the newly arrived birds, and reminds us that to discount our own emotions toward home is to ignore biology itself.

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