On a clear October night, I watched a ragged skein of geese slide across the stars and felt the familiar tug of the old question: how do they know where to go? For decades, the answer looked like a magician’s trick hidden in plain sight, a sense beyond our own that tuned birds to ...
On moonless nights above the Atlantic, tiny songbirds slip through darkness with a confidence that seems impossible, while young sea turtles push into surf, as if listening to a map stitched into the planet itself. For decades, scientists puzzled over this long-distance certainty: how do animals cross hemispheres and return to the same beaches or ...
Billions of birds travel distances incomprehensible to humans annually. Some, like the Arctic tern, log sufficient miles in their lifetime to fly to the moon and back without ever consulting a map or GPS. Rather, they depend on an astonishing range of biological tools: celestial cues, magnetic fields, quantum mechanics, even their sense of smell. ...
