Birds do it. Bees do it. Learning about the astounding navigational feats of wild creatures can teach us a lot about where we’re going.
.” An ardent ornithologist, Weidensaul sometimes shares a few too many details about a few too many species, but one sympathizes: virtually every bird in the book does book-worthy things. Consider the bar-headed goose, which migrates every year from central Asia to lowland India, at elevations that rival those of commercial airplanes; in 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first ascent of Mt.
Many animals, however, navigate using senses alien to us. Pigeons, whales, and giraffes, among others, can detect infrasound—low-frequency sound waves that travel hundreds of miles in air and even farther in water. Eels and sharks can sense electric fields and find their way around underwater via electric signatures.
True navigation is the ability to reach a distant destination without the aid of landmarks. If you were kidnapped, taken in pitch darkness thousands of miles away, and abandoned somewhere uninhabited, true navigation would be your only option for finding your way home. But instinct alone does not explain what such birds can do. In 2006, scientists in Washington State trapped a group of white-crowned sparrows that had begun their annual migration from Canada to Mexico and transported them in a windowless compartment to New Jersey—the avian equivalent of the kidnapping thought experiment. Upon release, the juvenile birds—those making their first trip—headed south along the same bearing that they had been using back in Washington.
One possible explanation for this strange phenomenon lies in a protein called cryptochrome, which is found in the retina of certain animals. Some scientists theorize that, when a molecule of cryptochrome is struck by a photon of light , an electron within it is jolted out of position, generating what is known as a radical pair: two parts of the same molecule, one containing the electron that moved and the other containing an electron left unpaired by the shift.
Needless to say, you and I cannot do this. If you blindfold human subjects, take them on a disorienting bus ride, let them off in a field, remove the blindfolds, and ask them to head back toward where they started, they will promptly wander off in all directions. If you forgo the bus and the blindfolds, ask them to walk across a field toward a target, and then conceal the target after they start moving, they will stray off course in approximately eight seconds.
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