How, also, does a first-year McGillivray’s warbler know when it’s reached the wintering “place”? It’s never been there before. The right combination of habitat, light, temperature, and some other things we can never know. Or something else entirely.
I think the Bush people of the Kalahari have a sense of place that is closer to the kestrel’s than ours. All place is divided up into what is a likely source of this plant or that, what these tracks mean about which animal went that way when…
Do you have the source of the Stegner quote? I think it belongs in the Ecotone Wiki list…
