Review by Choice Review
This book describes navigational feats, experiments, states of knowledge, and unanswered questions about how animals (mainly insects and birds) find their way to nests and food over short and long distances. How do they do it? How do scientists learn how they do it? Navigation and homing require processing geospatial information from visual, chemical, and magnetic cues. Animals have many sensory modalities and can process complex information from multiple sources. Each chapter offers a human navigation analogy and concludes with a future research example while describing navigation problems and problem solvers. For example, Arctic terns return to the same gravel bar year after year from their Antarctic "winter" quarters. Some of the young learn routes from their parents. But how does a newly hatched red knot (sandpiper) find its way from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, then back again, stopping at known food-rich sites, such as Delaware Bay (where researchers have the opportunity to study them)? The author provides rich examples of the advances in the neurobiology of perception and brain organization that have enabled researchers to understand the maps of these avian travelers. Well written and accessible, this book will lead readers to conclude that animals are amazing, as is researchers' ingenuity. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students, general readers. --Joanna Burger, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
as I stood peering up in the sky to see the "river of raptors" moving through the Mexican state of Veracruz, I needed to adjust my expectations. The birds were much higher up in the sky than I had thought. Looking through binoculars, 1 could see thousands of tiny specks drifting in the same direction. Up to two million broad-winged hawks and one million Swainson's hawks come through every fall, not to mention one and a half million turkey vultures, all from North America on their way down south. Bird navigation has fascinated scientists for ages, starting with the Italian pioneer Floriano Papi, who proposed that homing pigeons pay attention to the smells that blow across their lofts. We all know that pigeons are able to return home from long distances away, but no one was ready to believe that they do so based on scent, not even Papi's own wife, as he himself joked. For anyone interested in what happened to his olfactory navigation hypothesis, and how it stacks up against other ideas about homing, "Supernavigators" is the book for you. Its author, David Barrie, who himself has sailed the oceans using a sextant, is passionate about navigation and describes in delightful detail the myriad ways in which animals get around. With the advent of miniaturized GPS chips we have entered the golden age of animal tracking. We can now follow the arctic tern, which may travel 56,000 miles in a year, as well as the albatross, which sails the winds hundreds of miles per day. The book gives the history of major discoveries as well as the latest insights, such as about the North American monarch butterfly, which migrates south. We knew little about this remarkable feat until relatively recently, when the Canadian entomologist Frederick Urquhart made his discoveries. After searching for hiding places where his country's monarchs might be hibernating, and not finding any, he got the brilliant idea of tagging 300,000 butterflies with a number and a request (obviously in minuscule writing) to let him know where the animal had been found. He eventually learned that Canadian monarchs travel all the way to Texas and Mexico. They get there by orienting to the sun's position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. In 1976, Urquhart made front-page news with his announcement of an overwintering site in the Mexican mountains. Since then more such sites have been discovered, always at high altitude, each one packed with millions of butterflies. The number of animals traveling long distance, from insects to sea turtles, and from eels to whales, is just astonishing, as are the many ways in which they find their way. Scientists have also explored navigation in our own species: Studies into gender difference have found men on average more efficient at spatial orientation. Perhaps our male ancestors needed to roam far and wide to find food and mates. We now often let GPS devices do the navigation for us. With less practice remembering locations, our brains may change and we may have a reduced hippocampus. Navigation remains tremendously important for us, though, whether in the city or in the countryside. Whenever our smartphone lacks satellite service, we still need to tap into our natural navigational capacities even if they are no match for those of the supernavigators in this eyeopening book. FRANS de waal is a primatologist at Emory University and the author of "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barrie (Sextant), a member of the Royal Institute of Navigation, masterfully conveys new discoveries about animal navigation in this impressive popular science work. In addition to the usual suspects, such as the Monarch butterfly, Barrie relates the achievements of more obscure creatures, including the desert ants of North Africa, which use the sun as a compass. He notes that insect brains, despite their tiny size, consistently "generate an impressively diverse repertoire of navigational behavior." Even the lowly dung beetle is featured, as it is able to roll balls of dung in a straight line-backwards. Each chapter contains a surprise even for those familiar with the topic, such as the theory that homing pigeons make use of smell to navigate. Barrie cleverly stokes readers' curiosity about the subject with short sections at the end of each chapter describing even more remarkable, still unexplained feats, such as two-inch-long dragonflies that fly at least 3,500 kilometers over the ocean without stopping. More generally, he expresses a wish that what's been learned about the "neuroscience of navigation" in many species, including humans, might overcome anthropocentrism, driving home that "we are animals too." This is a must-read for anyone fascinated with the wonders of nature. Agent: Catherine Clarke, Felicity Bryan Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Whether dung beetles racing toward undisturbed dining spots or sea turtles returning to natal beaches, animals display impressive way-finding feats. Experimental research reveals that a variety of organisms can determine their location, plot or correct their course of travel, and even build and interpret internal maps. But as former transatlantic sailor Barrie (Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who Mapped the World's Oceans) notes, nonhuman species also use polarized light along with chemical (olfactory) and even magnetic cues that humans are unable to detect. Human disruption of the environment threatens animal navigation, and the author asserts that we should be better caretakers of our planet. This title is more suitable for casual science readers than James and Carol Gould's Nature's Compass: The Mystery of Animal Navigation, but with early chapters lacking a cohesive narrative, it is less literary than Bernd Heinrich's The Homing Instinct. VERDICT Readers interested in natural history or biology will find this stimulating.-Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
