Bernd Heinrich «The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration»

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Автор Bernd Heinrich

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.

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

Version: 2015-04-22

CONTENTS

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.