AWARENESS OF TIME AND SPACE 



To the human wayfarer such sky configurations are always interesting and 

 sometimes helpful as travel guides. It is possible that they may be useful 

 to birds in local orientation. Surely, at least, as we study the bird in its en- 

 vironment, we must acknowledge that there are a great many features of the 

 landscape, not all to be defined simply as "landmarks," that serve as cues 

 to avian orientation. 



Because the bird is so free on the wing we often think of its range as 

 boundless. All children, of course, know of the Robin's faithfulness to the 

 city neighborhood, and the work of Howard (1920) and his followers has 

 stressed the confining influence of territorial behavior and the home range 

 in birds. This restriction of activity does not hold for the breeding season 

 alone. The drake may move many miles from the nesting grounds to his 

 molting place, but once there, he settles down to a routine that covers a 

 rather restricted area. The stubble Mallard in August may range as far as 

 Fannestelle to feed, but bandings show that each night it returns with its 

 companions to the same sand bar on the Lake Manitoba shoreline. Juvenile 

 waterfowl may roam far and wide in their late-summer wanderings, but 

 when they stop for a while, banding records show that they usually use 

 the same restricted part of the marsh for feeding and loafing. During migra- 

 tion a banding trap will have many "repeats" of birds that come again and 

 again to the same feeding place during the course of their temporary 

 residence. Seton said (1910) that each animal "has a home-region, even if 

 it is not an actual home. ... In the idea of a home-region is the germ of 

 territorial rights. At every step it presents close and interesting parallels 

 with the growth of territorial law in man." 



Ornithologists have tended to view time and space as a series of dis- 

 crete, objectively determined units. Time is most often considered as though 

 broken into moments in the flow of life (like the time of morning song) or 

 into periods of life (like the length of incubation). Space is thought of as 

 though segmented into ranges (such as nest and territory) or into lineal 

 distances (such as between nesting place and wintering grounds). Such 

 time and space we measure precisely in hours or miles or in units thereof. 

 By so confining our thought to isolated or limited divisions of time and 

 space, we greatly restrict our understanding of the avian world. Each bird 

 lives in time that is not an instant of the present or a series of present in- 

 stants ; time is the flow of past, present, and future. "Time is as fundamental 

 as space ; and it is time, no doubt, that holds the essence of life, and perhaps 



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