A WALK ON THE WILDSIDE
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
One of the great wonders of nature is the ability of birds, animals and fish to find their way home. One of the prime examples is the life cycle of the salmon. During their second year, the young salmon move downstream to the sea, but when they reach sexual maturity, they head back to their birth-place to spawn. To reach it, they have to make choices, at the outflows of rivers into the sea, which is the river of their birth and how do they recognise it?
Scientists now believe that the salmon use subtle sensory clues, so keen that they bring them back to the very stream in which they were born. In an experiment naturalists have taken eggs from one stream and hatched them in another. The hatched salmon, tagged, found their way back to their own stream. But, as the salmon feels the urge ‘to head home to the gravel bed where he was born, he faces danger everywhere along the way. If he escapes the massive factory ships at sea, he still has to face nets in the estuaries and once he enters the river systems, he may fall victim to mink, lampreys or otters, but the salmon swims steadily on, making three to ten miles a day, depending on the current. He does not stop to feed, that strong desire to return home and start the cycle all over again drives him on. To the native American Indians, the salmon is a symbol of hope and rebirth.
Some scientists now believe that there is an unknown force at work, a force that guides creatures on their long and ardous journies homewards. Dr J B Rhine was a prominent American scientist who convinced many of his students that such a force was at work and after making a trip to study the facts at first hand, he came up with the following case histories. In 1939 young Hugh Perkins of Summersville, West Virginia found a stray carrier pigeon, exhausted and starved in his back garden. Hugh looked after the pigeon so well that it showed no inclination to ever leave again. The following day Hugh had to be flown 100 miles away over the mountains for an emergency operation. Some days later as he was recovering in hospital, he saw a pigeon fluttering outside his window. He had to call a nurse to open the window and straight away the pigeon made for Hugh’s hand. “Look at its leg” he cried to the nurse, “I’ll bet, it’s my bird, number 167”. The nurse read the band, AV39, C and W no 167, the pigeon had found his young master.
Dr Rhine then went on to tell his students of the story of Sugar the cat, who belonged to the Woods family in Anderson, California. When the Woods moved to a farm outside Gage, Oklahoma in June, 1951, they left Sugar behind in the care of a friend. In August, 1952, 14 months later, Mr. and Mrs Woods were in their barn; milking, when a cat-leaped through the open window onto Mrs Woods shoulder. It purred and rubbed against Mrs Woods. They could hardly believe their eyes, but sure enough it was Sugar the cat they had left in West Virginia. It had made a journey of hundreds of miles to be re-united with his family. Then there was the case of Tony, who started out life as a black cocker spaniel, but grew into a distinctive multibreed all of his own, Tony was owned by the Doolan family of Aurora, Illinois, when the Doolens decided to move to Lansing in Michigan in June 1945, they gave Tony to family friends in Aurora, but the dog grew lonesome for his owners and ran away.
Seven weeks later, Mr Doolan was walking down the main street in Lansing, when he was suddenly pounced on by a bedraggled black dog. It was Tony, wagging his tale furiously and licking his master’s face. All doubt as removed when Mr Doolan recognised Tony’s leather collar, which he had made for the dog himself. How did the pigeon, Tony and Sugar, manage to find their owners over such vast distances? Nature keeps her secrets.