MIRACLES OF INSTINCT

Otago Witness, Issue 3510, 21 June 1921, Page 42

MIRACLES OF INSTINCT

"I was recently watching a pair of thrushes at work building their nest, and by a certain crudeness in the work and by the appearance of the birds themselves, I gather that they were only hatched last spring and that this is their first attempt at housekeeping. But how have they the knowledge to build at all?” asks a writer in the Daily Mail. “How do they know what materials to use, how to select a site, and the quite intricate methods of weaving the bents and blades together ? Inherited instinct, you say. Yes, but how is it inherited? A man could not build a house for himself without much teaching, yet all birds aro able to do so, even in the very first year of their lives. Not only that, but they understand tho art of harmonising the nest with its suroundings so that enemies will pass iti unnoticed. “ The migrant birds are beginning to return, and soon will bo coming in hosts. Yv ithout the mechanical aid of the compass men would never dare venture out of sight of land. Yet a swallow that has wintered in the Sudan, or even as far south as Natai, flies straight as a die over thousands of miles of land and sea back to the same English barn where it nested in the ptpvious summer. It has been euggested that the old birds show the young the way, but this idea is completely refuted by the fact that the young- cuckoo does not leave England until some weeks after the parent birds have flown, yet makes its flight to Africa without the slightest trouble. “ Birds have a sixth sense, a sense which wo humans cannot conceive of, let- alone describe. We can call it a sense of locality, but that is as far as we can go. There are other creatures which share this sense. Take salmon ova from a Scottish stream, carry them in cold storage halfway round the world to New Zealand, and hatch them in a Now* Zealand river. The little silvery eraolis will in due course find their way down the river to an unknown sea where until recently salmon never swam. There they will loam to unknown distances, but eventually the survivors will return out of the trackless depths of salt water to the selfsame stream wheie they were hatched, and drivo up it to the spawning ground. Each year the herrings come down the east coast of England along the same route and almost at the same date Each year the cod appear upon the Newfoundland banks with similar exactitude. The people, of Samoa hold holiday noon a certain day in the rear when vast shoals of a small fish resembling whitepass through the lagoons surrounding the islands and arc netted in multitudes. I am told that the oldest inhabitant cannot remember a year when those fish failed to make their appearance exactly to date.”