The Homing Instinct

by Bernd Heinrich

Home is where what you do has consequences, and where you expect and get feedback—both positive and negative—from what you do. That feedback is perhaps the main, if not only, mechanism that maintains balance with the environment that we deem relevant to us. Not being homebound permits exporting the costs of our actions. Without feedback, either positive or negative, we inevitably enter what biologist Garrett Hardin famously called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” It’s the use of the oceans as a dump for plastics, the unrestricted fisheries that depleted the fish stocks. It’s the impact on the anonymous, who live outside the home boundary. Instead of “immediate” local death for mistakes, we can anticipate long-term global effects instead. Ultimately, however, our unrestricted use of powerful technology has made the whole global environment our home. It’s our oikos, the Greek word for “house” or home that the German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined for ecology.

  We are, like other animals, adapted to invent boundaries that enclose and specify our home so that we can make, improve, and defend it. Home to us is not the “out there” in the far reaches where what we do has no impact, and vice versa. Only knowledge and imagination can reach there. Feelings can follow but do so reluctantly. Sensory experience is more powerful. Seeing the Earth from the moon would be such an experience, and the few of us who have had that experience—astronauts to the moon—report (www.spacequotations.com) that it had a transforming effect on them, because from space they saw no boundaries, and the whole Earth suddenly seemed like home. We went to study the moon but saw the Earth instead. Ironically, perhaps, it is our technology that took us to the moon and beyond, and our technology has literally had global effects and therefore made the whole Earth our home, whereas before it was divided by boundaries of separate homes. Now, by looking into the rearview mirror, so to speak, we see the reality of what we did, in a physical image of what is our communal home. Yet, at the same time that we are seeing the whole Earth, we are also psychologically severing ourselves from it. We are becoming an urban species.

  Our population grows at around seventy-nine million per year, and with most of the growth in cities, with people interconnected by ever more electronics, we are becoming increasingly more oriented to each other. We are attaching to and becoming emotionally linked to social, political, religious, economic, industrial, educational, and other social factions, as opposed to the mountains, the prairies, the forests, the winds and the weather, the rain and the soil and the oceans and the fish and the birds, insects, bison, and butterflies—all are the ties that had bound us to our planet, but always before locally, to a home.

  We are loosening the emotional ties to home ground and forming ties to the ersatz, not because we don’t want to be tied to home, but because there is less opportunity to make a home. When we became agriculturists, our hunter-gatherer lifestyle—which intimately bound us to our homes of Earth and its plants and animals—changed to the huge detriment of the Earth that nurtures us. Now, our ancient hunter-gatherer heritage in the context of immense populations and globalization has turned those instincts inward onto ourselves instead.

  Social orientation evolved and evolves because it aids immediate survival and reproduction. It does not see what the future might hold; neither locusts, passenger pigeons, nor bison had inklings of drastic changes ahead of them from the world they evolved in. We changed their world. Now we are changing ours—in ways that could never have been conceived. At our current trajectory, the technology we are riding on to see the world from space is also having a huge impact on it. We could end up completing a circle of seeming self-sufficiency, to become a species of crowd shoppers like the hoppers and the pigeons looking en masse for the next bargain. Will we, like a school of fish confronting a whale, continue our until-now proven survival strategies of massing together, or will we see, and change to something new?

  I do not here, after talking about all the amazing beauty of the life on this planet, intend to end on a glum note. The point is, we can see the magnitude of what’s up. We are different in that way from all of “them” that have just bitten the dust, and unique also from the rest that we have considered inferior to us. We are different also in that the destruction of home boundaries that creates the Commons and Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy” of it, can also be an opportunity to pull together to face our common enemy: massive overpopulation. I think Walt Kelly’s comic character Pogo of the Okefenokee Swamp said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

  Epilogue

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  I RETURNED RECENTLY TO THE TINY HAMLET OF HINCKLEY, Maine, where fifty years earlier, after a good deal of exploring, I had grown and graduated from the Good Will Home, School, and Farm. As a line from the song lyrics to “The Green, Green Grass of Home” says: “The old home town looks the same, as I step down from the train.” I didn’t know what to expect, as I drove on the highway along the old railroad tracks next to Maine’s great river, the Kennebec. Once on campus I walked down the lane past Pike Cottage, where I lived during my six years at Good Will, and then continued on up Uncle Ed’s road, where I had been hundreds of times. I wanted to see an old sugar maple tree with the huge limbs where we kids had dangled a long rope from a thick limb. The tree, old even then, was still there, and I now only imagined us climbing the rope practicing hand-over-hand pull-ups, and running and swinging out over the bushes, practicing to become Tarzan. I had not gone to the school willingly but now remembered the place with fondness.

  Several of us boys had a secret place out in the woods not far from the rope and had started to make a log cabin. It was our special place where, at different times of the year, we tried maple sugaring and other subsistence living, such as cooking a squirrel I’d gotten with my slingshot over a fire in the snow, or in season roasting a squab on a stick. We’d picked it out of a nest at the barns. On occasion, we even got a porcupine. We tried to escape our cottage and the evil housemother whenever we could, and finally two of my buddies and I decided our outings were so much fun that we had to “run away” and live in the woods permanently (into our foreseeable future, which was not far ahead). Alaska seemed unrealistic, so I convinced my chums to accompany me into the mountains near Weld, a few kilometers from where my family had settled after we arrived in America. I had there felt my first taste of “belonging” and had wanted to stay there forever and become a beekeeper or a farmer. Or maybe it was a trapper. I’m not sure now, but I did want to be somewhere else. As Maine writer E. B. White put it (in “The Years of Wonder” about his trip to Alaska): “There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.” That was us. And so Phillip, Freddie, and I one night, each carrying a light backpack containing enough food for at least a day, or so, headed out into the woods, in the general direction of the mountains near Weld.

  My parents had decided to come to America. They had lost not only home, haunts, and other property, but also parents, friends, a language, social standing, familiar and loved fields and forests. For me on my childhood trip to America, home was in the future, not the past. But it was the recent past that made me want to go back toward the mountains near Weld, near where we had landed after a long unsettled period in Germany.

  Papa had grown up on his family farm called Borowke, in what was then the province of West Prussia in Germany. At age seventeen he joined the German army to fight in the First World War to protect his home from the Russian invasion; that was his declared motivation. After his two plane crashes in the newly formed Luftwaffe, and the lost war, his homeland became Poland. But his home was still as ever his home, except he had to convince the now-Polish authorities that he and his forebears had always been loyal to Borowke,
to allow them to let him stay home. World War Two loomed, then came, and our family was driven out by the Red Army troops. Traveling with millions of other refugees, after a perilous three-month journey by horse-drawn wagon, truck, train, rickety airplane on an almost empty gas tank, and for a while even a German army tank, and then again by horse-drawn wagon, we finally ended up in western Germany near Hamburg. We were lucky; a farmer there offered us shelter in an open cowshed, and from there we found our one-room hut in the middle of a forest called the Hahnheide. And when we did finally come almost penniless to America and settled on a depleted little farm in Wilton, near Weld, Maine, Papa called it New Borowke, and so I planted a row of trees down the driveway, just like the one he said he had loved at Borowke.

  Landing in rural Maine, we were surrounded by small scattered farmsteads. Almost immediately hands and hearts reached out, a party was held, and we met the families of Floyd Adams, Frank Currier, Erland Adams, Phillip Potter, Earl Ellrich, Keith Brooks . . . in a short time we knew neighbors for kilometers around. We were showered with the essentials for living, and our social schedule was constant. When I stepped on a beer bottle along the ditch (I went barefoot in the summer), the town doctor, Herbert Zikel, stitched me up. No money asked. He took us to his camp by Webb Lake next to the mountains in Weld. And when the roof needed fixing, which was immediately, Floyd and Phil came over and helped. My parents needed a horse to haul logs they had cut by hand with a crosscut saw, and neighbor Erland Adams offered them Susie (his tan mare). No money was asked. None given. It was just the neighborly thing to do.

  Most of the pioneers in America had come similarly, after severing their ancient roots, presumably because they were no longer flourishing where they were. They may also have sought adventure, to see and experience the new, but I suspect that was mostly in retrospect. They had practically a whole continent to settle in. If they didn’t like it one place, they could move on to the next. My family loved where we landed and would not have considered going anywhere else. But many people from there had much earlier left to “go west,” which was one reason that Maine woods real estate was cheap. I recall my father thinking that Americans were shiftless, that they had no moral commitment to stay home, but rather wandered like a flock of pigeons to wherever there was mast to feed on. He was afraid that I might turn out that way.

  It is true that at that time I needed to explore and wander, as the young of many animals do. I didn’t know it then, but my life would mirror that of the albatross and the young salmon that leave their homes to roam, and return as adults to their imprinted home or to the close vicinity of it. The memory that binds does not fade.

  The Floyd Adams family had taken us onto their farm and into their home. Floyd took me with his sons beelining in the old apple orchard, and coon hunting with his hound in the woods. He drove us in his maroon Pontiac to show us the nearby mountains and Webb Lake and his camp there along a brook by Holt Hill. On our first drive there we saw a (for me) wonder of wonders perched right over us on a branch of an oak tree: a porcupine. The Adams couple with their three young boys also took us blueberry harvesting on the mountains there, Mount Bald, Tumbledown, and Jackson. We returned home carrying wicker baskets full of berries on our backs. Back at the farm, Floyd had a rowboat on Pease Pond at the edge of their property where we went fishing, and the farm where we settled was on the other side of that pond where Phil and Myrtle Potter lived. They had their own tarpaper shack also near Webb Lake in Weld, in Carthage on the south side of Cherry Hill where Phil took me deer hunting. For canoeing we went on Bog Stream at the village of Chesterville. Western Maine was paradise if you were free to roam, but then when my parents had to leave “to make a living,” my sister and I were left for six and eight years respectively at the Good Will School, from which after five years I prematurely tried the aforementioned return home by making a beeline back to that area that I had grown to love. And, after walking two days and one night, we (almost) got there.

  I angered my father by “running” away from Good Will School where he had placed me. However, in retrospect, I think he should have praised me, because one of his values, almost in a moral sense, was loyalty to one’s home. Two years later I ended up, by some near miracle, at the University of Maine, but then after I also graduated with honors, I think my father’s fears materialized when I went to California, getting married and earning a PhD degree at UCLA and then a professorship in entomology at UC Berkeley. I stayed for fifteen years. Didn’t I have any “roots”? Didn’t I possess the most basic of values? Although my intent was not to please him, I still started commuting back home to Maine and the farm almost every summer with Kathryn, my bride, and our baby daughter, Erica. However, as might be expected, living with my family at my parents’ place with our dog, along with my two tame but free and pesky ravens that we had brought along, created friction. We were not as welcome as I had expected; parent-offspring conflict started. I was dismissive and almost oblivious of it then, because I was focusing on my fieldwork on bumblebee behavior and pollination.

  In 1976, after I had commuted from California every summer to be home to study my bumblebees, Mike Graham, a Maine neighbor and my former University of Maine proctor and friend at “The Cabins” (housing for independent living reserved for low-income students) where I had stayed when I studied there, told me that “about three hundred acres” of land were for sale near Weld. I didn’t hesitate to apply for a loan to purchase this land, which was the old farm on Adams Hill (later also known as York Hill). Four years later my new bride, Maggie, and I lived there one summer in an existing old one-room tarpapered hunting shack with a weathered sign over the door reading “Kamp Kaflunk.” For company we had a tame great horned owl and two tame American crows. The owl and the crows roamed free in the woods and sometimes accompanied us the kilometer down to the Alder Brook for mutual baths. We later built a log cabin in the nearby overgrowing field, where the old Adams/York homestead had stood before it was taken by fire in the early 1930s. The foundation of unmortared fieldstones remained but was crumbling into the old cellar hole now sprouting trees. We had ongoing projects studying bumblebees, white-faced hornets, butterflies, and ant lions.

  Having bought title to the property in 1977, I was ever more eager to stay home, and so I resigned my position at Berkeley and returned to Maine the first chance I had. That was in 1980, when I was offered a position at the University of Vermont. This was close enough for me to continue the fieldwork, and at the same time to start puttering around in the old cellar hole and dreaming about making a home on the Adams/York Hill farm site. To the albatrosses, loons, and us, home often turns out to be near where we grew up. Memory and yearnings bring us back, and knowledge binds us.

  Like beavers’ home-making, mine involved making a clearing. I sharpened my ax and went to work clearing brush. Dark shady forest can be depressing to live in continuously, although I understand the benefits of keeping forest precisely like that, for the animals that need it. The animal in my soul, though, likes sunshine and “a view.” The clearing I eventually created is an island in the ocean of forest that surrounds it. It is the only place where the fireweed, goldenrod, and meadowsweet bloom, and so it is a prime place for butterflies and various interesting kinds of wasps, flies, bees, and beetles. Come late summer, bumblebees swarm over the flowers to collect nectar and pollen. White-faced hornets built their paper nests in the meadowsweet and raspberry bushes, and for me they became convenient and cooperative subjects for studying the effects of their high motivation to attack related to their body temperature (it is raised by several degrees before and when they fly at you to sting). Admittedly, not everyone would enjoy these sorts of activities, which require time investment and pain tolerance, but most people would appreciate the birds.

  The clearing was and is alive with bird species that live nowhere else near there. First and foremost is a woodcock male (not necessarily the same one) who displays each evening and at dawn in the spring. His spectacular sky d
ance would entrance anyone who has an ounce of blood in his or her veins, and after the clearing greens up and the red and yellow hawkweed starts to bloom, there are the warbler concerts. The open habitat surrounding the cabin is home of the chestnut-sided, yellowthroat, and Nashville warblers. A pair of American goldfinches, American robins, and cedar waxwings usually live along the edges in the summer. Recently, wild turkeys have come also. But I don’t wish to take credit for this bounty; had a brook been immediately adjacent, the beavers would have made this open place instead. Furthermore, they and their descendants inheriting it would have continued to maintain this home for countless species for centuries. As it is, I now have a ceaseless task to keep the forest from taking it over.

  After answering the burning questions I had had about bumblebees, I switched to trying to solve a simple question about ravens. This took off and turned into almost a life work in which many neighbors, friends, and students participated. Meanwhile, I have shared the cabin and York/Adams Hill every winter for the past twenty-four years with a group of students for full-time natural history study during their semester break. The log cabin we built earlier served them well, but I eventually needed something more private, and better insulated from the cold in winter, if not also from the entry of the unwanted guests, mainly cluster flies, ladybird beetles, deer mice, and red squirrels.

  As a child I liked to be in enclosed spaces such as under a leafy arbor, especially if there was a view. I would then fill in “holes” of unwanted spaces with leafy twigs. Later I’d see another appealing spot. Birds in a nesting mood may make tentative nest starts at different locations, as though trying them out before finally committing to one. Inadvertently, I think I did the same in choosing the new cabin site. After examining several tentative home sites far and wide, in the end I picked the old cellar hole that was already next to the log cabin.