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Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014.
First published in hardback in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014.
Text and illustrations copyright © Bernd Heinrich 2014
Cover photograph © Antagain / Getty Images
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007594054
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007594061
Version: 2015-04-22
CONTENTS
By the Sun, Stars, and Magnetic Compass
II. HOME-MAKING AND MAINTAINING
Charlotte II: A Home Within a Home
Of Trees, Rocks, a Bear, and a Home
ABOUT A DECADE AGO I STARTED PULLING TOGETHER BITS and pieces on the “homing” topic and in 2011 had a book manuscript scheduled for publication. I was then living at “camp” in Maine, where I had done my fieldwork on bumblebees for years; lately my work involved feeding ravens with cow carcasses in the winter, and I then got interested in beetles that bury mouse carcasses in the summer. Soon the topic of recycling of animal carcasses of all sorts seemed more urgent than the scheduled book about getting to and living in a particular place. So, I put writing about homing on hold. By the time I again picked up my pencil, it seemed as though everything I thought of or had an interest in had, in one way or another, started to have a bearing on home and homing. In the meantime I had also been confronting personal issues of “homing,” and they seemed to take on increasingly similar forms to what I was reading about in animals.
I had already left my academic position in Vermont and wanted to return home to live in Maine, possibly in the home to which I had bonded strongly as a child. I had planted a row of trees there about thirty-five years ago. Those trees, now huge, brought back many memories related to them. They reminded me of my father, who had liked them, probably because he had strong feelings for a row of chestnut trees that also lined the way to his old home in the old country that he had often talked about. Because I had written a book about my father, and not also one about my sisters or my mother, I had come into the disfavor of both. There had been parent-offspring conflict before my mother died,