Читать книгу The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration - Bernd Heinrich - Страница 5

PREFACE

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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, and then the house stood empty. So then there was also sibling rivalry over the estate. It seemed like being in a real-life situation of the sociobiology theories, in an almost perfect rendition of a naked mole rat colony where one of the family finds a big tuber, and the others claim it as theirs, and then a vocally assertive member establishes herself as the matriarch. I realized then that the difference between what can happen to a human and to a naked mole rat family is mainly one of terminology. This thus provided the topic of home and homing a much wider perspective.

The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration

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