The Nomadic Alternative – Page 25

For mammals, birds, reptiles, insects and fish the strong

desire to wander is an imperative to go. Fins flicking, wings

beating or buzzing, feet stamping or pattering, these fearless

geographers journey to ‘far-flung Bermudas’, to seed a new genera-

tion on a beach, spawn in a mountain stream, find fresh grass or

pollinate a nocturnal flower. With the exception of molluscs and

hydroids nearly all animals activate, orient themselves and move

of their own volition to predetermined appointments with life or

death. Plants slumber in supine drowsiness.

The limpet has a home and a migration path. Locusts swarm.

Butterflies flutter across the Pacific. Breeding whales swim from

polar to tropical seas. A salmon can taste the waters of its ances-

tral river. Elvers migrate from the Sargasso Sea, as eels grow fat

and slimy in a freshwater pool, and return to their birthplace to

breed and die. Season after season the hoofprints of reindeer and

caribou follow the same appointed track. The fledgling cuckoo

follows its unknown parents to their winter quarters. Small birds

cross Alps and Cordilleras on their annual journeys. The Albatross

glides round the earth on the gales of the Roaring Forties. And

the Arctic Tern does streak from one polar ice-cap to the other.

A delicate balance between the demands of the stomach and the

compulsions of sex conditions the range of these journeys. But the

animal geographers live in a perpetual present and do not plot them

in advance. Instead they inherit a foreknowledge of the stations

on the way. Or they learn them very quickly on their first migration

and preserve them for the rest of their lives. And apart from these

interior atlases, they have innate diet-sheets and manuals of

diplomacy, defence, sexual instruction, child-rearing and house-

keeping. Some animals have all their problems solved in advance

and from birth know instinctively how to navigate through life.

Others need instruction from their parents who tune their instincts

to function correctly.

Visual memory enables migrant animals to read a landscape – its

shape, texture and plant cover. Then they have internal chronometers,