{"id":5408,"date":"2024-05-20T15:17:54","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T19:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=5408"},"modified":"2024-05-20T15:17:55","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T19:17:55","slug":"animal-magnetism-the-birds-and-the-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/animal-magnetism-the-birds-and-the-bees\/","title":{"rendered":"Animal Magnetism: The Birds and the Bees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

But not the way you thought<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Annis Pratt<\/strong>
Current Contributor<\/strong>

Somewhere, way out on the edges of our winter-tattered selves, we are beginning to think about spring. The lessening of the dark hours, a whiff of moss, a sudden mild breeze that all too quickly gives way to a chillier one\u2014all are small signs kindling our weary hopes.

We begin to hear barely audible trills from high up in the trees or from deep in the bushes; these are the contact calls of tiny warblers that have dropped down from the wind on their epically long migrations. Some will stay, because their nesting places from last year are on our land; others will continue to the exact spot they were raised and\/or where they have raised young before.\u00a0

How do migratory birds find their way from South America, Mexico, and the southern United States to these precise spots in Northern Michigan?\u00a0\u00a0

Last April, I received an absorbing book for my birthday; the book is so long and so scientific that I am only just now finishing it. (I should admit only diving into the nonfiction books that sit by my reading chair for an hour or two each week.)\u00a0\u00a0

Ed Yong, in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Worlds Around Us<\/em>, explains bird migration for us:\u00a0

\u201cEvery winter, thrush nightingales must cross the immense Sahara Desert on their way from Europe to Southern Africa.\u00a0 Once they sense the magnetic field of northern Egypt, they react by packing on more fat, in anticipation of the arduous desert crossing ahead. Other migrating songbirds can use these magnetic maps to adjust their bearing, if they\u2019re blown off course by strong winds\u2026\u201d\u00a0\u00a0

An Immense World<\/em> is full of wonders\u2014from octopus sentience to how bacteria strew fields of magnetic crystals\u2014all based on the idea that each species of creature operates within a distinct \u201cumwelt,\u201d <\/em>the world that it experiences through its unique constellation of senses.\u00a0\u00a0

We learn in Yong\u2019s book, for example, that one ant might tap at another \u201cwith the tips of its clubby antennae. This action, delightfully … known as antennating, the ant equivalent of a sniff.\u201d Too, \u201cfemale lobsters urinate into the faces of males to tempt them with a sex pheromone.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0

Fortunately, every species operates within a different umwelt\u2014what would happen if we humans tried that on each other?\u00a0

It has been known for quite a while that cells contain magnetic substances and that creatures like birds and turtles navigate by responding to \u201cmagnetic signposts\u201d on routes that are governed by a magnetic pull from their birthplace. \u00a0 For instance, sea turtles always return to the exact beach where they emerged from their own eggs, and if a salmon is hatched in a tank containing Platte River water, it will return to the Platte River to spawn. (There is a local legend that Betsie River folk tell about how, one year, the Platte hatchery used well water by mistake so that, given a choice, the salmon, of course, all chose the Betsie.)

And did you know that \u201clife exists within a planetary electric field and is affected by it\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0

Bees, for example, become positively charged by bumping into bits of dust and debris in the air, while flowers are negatively charged from being grounded in water. \u201cWhen positively charged bees arrive at negatively charged flowers, sparks don\u2019t fly, but pollen does\u201d\u2014just picture all those tiny flecks of pollen responding to bee magnetism in a golden explosion!\u00a0

One of the things that Yong\u2019s book leaves me wondering about is whether the science of electrical fields and magnetic maps suggests some philosophical metaphors worth pondering.\u00a0

Namely, more and more these days, we hear the expression, \u201cHe doesn\u2019t seem to have a moral compass!\u201d\u00a0

If you picture a compass, you will remember a red\u2014or otherwise distinctly marked\u2014arrow pointing to the North Pole, which is called \u201cTrue North.\u201d In other words, if you choose your actions according to a moral compass, it means that you have the integrity of being true to a set of values.\u00a0\u00a0

When my sailor father died and I was emptying out the pockets of his sou\u2019wester, I found a cheap little compass that I had given him 40 years before that was still pointing \u201cTrue North.\u201d\u00a0

The way that my mind works, the idea of being embedded in a planetary electric field gets me thinking about interplanetary communications between a quark here and its little twin, humming along somewhere out in the vast universe with precisely the same vibration.\u00a0

And that gets me wondering whether all of my dear lost ones might be humming away somehow\u2014out there among the stars\u2014and might not be so lost after all.

It looks like sitting quietly in my chair, poring over my winter-to-spring read, which has exploded my world with wonder!

Annis Pratt has a cottage on the Betsie River. She has been a bird watcher since 1947 and finds the banks of the Betsie an absolute bird paradise. She is author of <\/em>The Infinite Games Series<\/em><\/strong> of adventure novels about a marshland folk who are threatened by the draining of their homeland and of three non-fiction books about the way that myths are used in literature. She is a nature writer, a columnist for the international e-magazine <\/em>Impakter.com<\/em><\/strong>, and was an early contributor to <\/em>The Betsie Current<\/em><\/strong>, back in the 2005-06 days. Visit AnnisPratt.com to learn more or look for her books on Amazon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But not the way you thought<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[282,171,41,287,56,44],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/TylerFranz_web.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3TDCr-1pe","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5410,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408\/revisions\/5410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}