The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

The Homing Sense of Birds. We can go no farther than to say that while the homing instinct of certain species of birds is quite well known, the mental process by which it functions is practically unknown. The direction instinct of the homing pigeon is marvelous, but we know that that instinct does not leap full- fledged from the nest. The homer needs assistance and training. When it is about three months old, it is taken in a basket to a point a mile distant from its home and liberated. If it makes good in returning to the home loft, the distances are increased by easy stages--two, three, five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty and seventy- five miles usually being flown before the bird is sent as far as 100 miles. The official long-distance record for a homing pigeon is 1689.44 miles, held by an American bird. The homing instinct, or sense, is present in some mammals, but it is by no means so phenomenal as in some species of birds. In mammals it is individual rather than species-wide. Individual horses, dogs and cats have done wonderful things under the propulsion of the homing instinct, but that instinct is by no means general throughout those species. Among wild animals, exhibitions of the home-finding instinct are rare, but the annals of the Zoological Park contain one amusing record. For emergency reasons, a dozen fallow deer once were quartered in our Bison range, behind a fence only sixty-six inches high. Presently they leaped out to freedom, disappeared in the thick northern forests of the Bronx, and we charged them up to profit and loss. But those deer soon found that life outside our domain was not the dream of paradise that they had supposed. After about a week of wandering through a cold, unsympathetic and oatless world those were sadder and wiser deer, and one night they all returned and joyously and thankfully jumped back into their range, where they were happy ever after.