num_pages: 368
description: 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 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 birdsand reminds us that to discount our own emotions toward home is to ignore biology itself.
language: English
title: The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt