The Homing Instinct

Finally! It took me a while to get through this, but I was distracted, between big life events and many of the other books I want to read, have started to read, or finished reading since my last post. This is the first Bernd Heinrich book for me to read; I had been wanting to read something by him for a while. At first I wasn’t sure, but I think this was a good one to start with. It is a collection of loosely related pieces. About half of the book is about the science of migration, and the other approximate half is personal memoir, pertaining to the author’s own homing instinct. The timing proved to be appropriate for me, in a symbolic way: the day I began reading, and the day I finished, I was away from home, but in between, and for over a year now I have been at home and wanting to move on. However, I love my home, and understand Heinrich’s feelings about the Maine woods he grew up in.

So many subjects are covered in this book, and maybe it tries to cover too much.  As a whole, it could be more cohesive, but it is well written and any chapter is enjoyable on its own. How does he decide what to include?, I found myself wondering. His familiarity with so many organisms and the science pertaining to them serves this book well. The sketches are also a nice supplement to the text.

The bird on the cover, for example, is a bar-tailed godwit, which can fly across the Pacific Ocean non-stop! It does this after nesting in Alaska, flying to Australia or New Zealand. Flying from there to Alaska, it makes a few stops, and in these flights changes its body weight by 2-3 times. This is just one of the many profiles crammed into the book. All are fun to read. Each species is unique in its homing “instinct” and he acknowledges this. Sandhill cranes are the opener, and bees buzz among many pages.  I didn’t know there were no bees in North America until the colonists brought them here in the early-mid 1600s. To give a sense of what the author’s personality might be like, he counted over 500 of one species of insect while jogging (as recorded in a journal of his in 1985). Also, later in the book he compares his own physiology to that of a bee.

The chapter “By the Sun, Stars, and Magnetic Compass” seemed more organized and flows better, though maybe I was more focused when reading it. In general I tend to enjoy books more if I can read them in short periods of time with extended “sessions”. Reading a little bit here and there (for the first time) is usually less pleasant, so that may bias my reviewing.

“Home-making in Suriname” was only loosely related to the theme of the book, but is a good stand-alone travel adventure that found its home in this text and comes away with a nice message. The setting reminded me of “The Lost Steps” by Alejo Carpentier, for better or worse, and it is exciting to read about a challenging excursion into one of the few still-pristine places. In the last chapter of the second section about how communal homes first arose, the mentioned hypothetical speculation happened around the time the expected processes were observed in real species. Perhaps this inspired him to speculate on the unpleasant topic of population control of the Homo genus.

In one of the ‘personal’ chapters at the cabin in the woods, there is a real-life Charlotte the spider. Her story is drawn largely from the author’s journal, where it is evident that he is a keen observer of his wild visitors and their behavior. This is in addition to the experiments of others – some simple, some quite clever – that spice up the book. His own backyard home experiments with Chestnut trees are a demonstration of boundaries by seed dispersal, and are a nice conservation effort. Heinrich’s relationship with his nephew is a good one, and brings a real human element to this interesting collection of natural histories. The book’s epilogue is like a short chapter, a biograph, the family’s connection to the land and to other people there. I can say that I got a few interesting facts out of this read, and at a less busy time of my life I look forward to reading more of the author’s works.