MIGRATIONS OF WATERFOWL 



way to the bedroom is a learned route; he is directed there by the whole 

 body to satisfy the appetites arising from inner stimuli. The appetite is 

 not for the bed, but for the instinctive act of sleep. In the same way the 

 hen moves to her nest, not hungering for the nest itself, but to complete 

 the act of egg-laying. By the same pattern, man goes to kitchen or bed- 

 room, bird to slough or gravel bar, neither hungering so much for the 

 geographic place as for the completion there of instinctive acts. 



In man, for all his intelligence, this orientation within the home environ- 

 ment is conducted without conscious organization; oriented movements 

 develop with the same spontaneity as words flowing together to make the 

 spoken sentence. "We seldom think of this experience with space," says 

 Katz (1953:99), "except when we have some special reason to be aware 

 of it. . . . This mechanism of orientation is easy to use when one does not 

 think about it, but seems to resist deliberate manipulation." 



Gregg's experiment concerned only compass direction. We know very 

 little about man's awareness of the sun or other celestial bodies, except as 

 their place in navigation is taught to him. The early mariners relied heavily 

 on the sun and the stars in their voyages. In modern celestial navigation, 

 computation of a "line of position" from the stars is a complicated process 

 involving spherical trigonometry (if prepared tables are not at hand), and, 

 besides, there must be a sextant and a chronometer set to Greenwich Mean 

 Time. Yet, with no understanding of trigonometry, without charts, with- 

 out sextant or chronometer, the Polynesians followed the stars in their 

 travels about the South Pacific, the navigational techniques delivered from 

 one generation to the next by tradition. They "considered the stars as mov- 

 ing bands of light that passed across the inverted pit of the sky, and they 

 sailed toward the stars which they knew passed over the islands of their 

 destination" (Carson, 1951:211). 



We human beings are so concerned with the paraphernalia of civiliza- 

 tion that it is difficult to appraise our awareness of the sun with respect 

 to regional orientation. Two of my children, at the ages of seven and nine, 

 independently observed and commented upon the change in the sun's 

 schedule and position after a five-day trip from Delta, Manitoba, to Wash- 

 ington, D.C., in November. I find myself always conscious of the sun's 

 change of position and schedule when traveling away from Delta, and I 

 maintain an awareness of the location of Delta which I believe to be re- 

 lated to the sun. I also find it difficult to adjust immediately to "daylight 

 saving time," clinging for several days to the sun's rather than the clock's 



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