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The New Yorker
Dept. of Science
April 5, 2021 Issue

Why Animals Don't Get Lost

Birds do it. Bees do it. Learning about the astounding navigational
feats of wild creatures can teach us a lot about where we're going.

By Kathryn Schulz

March 29, 2021

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bird in flight
Why are other animals so much better than humans at way-finding?
Illustration by Miguel Porlan

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One of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed involved an
otherwise unprepossessing house cat named Billy. This was some years
ago, shortly after I had moved into a little rental house in the
Hudson Valley. Billy, a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, belonged to the
previous tenant, a guy by the name of Phil. Phil adored that cat, and
the cat--improbably, given his otherwise unenthusiastic feelings about
humanity--returned the favor.

On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a
cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new
apartment, in Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down I-84, in the middle of a
drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the
carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found that, from the
driver's seat, he could neither coax nor drag the cat back into
captivity. Moving carefully, he got out of the van, walked around to
the other side, and opened the door a gingerly two inches--whereupon
Billy shot out, streaked unscathed across two lanes of
seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, and disappeared into the wide,
overgrown median. After nearly an hour in the pouring rain trying to
make his own way to the other side, Phil gave up and, heartbroken,
continued onward to his newly diminished home.

Published in the print edition of the April 5, 2021, issue, with the
headline "Where the Wild Things Go."
[schulz-kat]
Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2016
Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
More:AnimalsCatsNatureTravelMigrationBooksBirdsScienceMagnetic Fields

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