We’ve all experienced the ache, one time or another. Homesickness and missing home. Or felt the spark of recognition in the chest when we get closer to our neighborhood, and that uniquely reassuring pleasure when we arrive after time away: home.
If you think about it, it’s remarkable that we form such deep attachment to a place, and that even after passing time and growing distance it can still retain the lure of attraction.
But we’re not the only ones who do. We don’t think about it, but animals in the wild are also wired to return unerringly to homes.
Birds who wing off to forage in the morning find their way back to their own nests again that night, foxes return to their dens, bees their hive. Animals know ‘home’ too.
We can’t know what feelings they attach, if any, to those chosen places.
But what’s undeniable, they do clearly recognize their home, and are drawn to return to it, even if only for a season.
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But when it comes to answering the call to go home, the salmon is in a league completely of its own.
If you’ve never seen a living salmon in a freshwater stream out in the woods, it’s amazing to discover them there, virtually invisible in the water.
I had the chance with a team of fishery biologists on Mill Creek, a small stream drifting through redwoods of North California.
In the early spring they set a catch-box and were busy counting and tagging four inch parrs (that’s what adolescent salmons are called) in the dappled light of the forest. They were virtually impossible to see in the water — the patterns, colors and marks on the young salmon, from the silver sides to the leopard spots to the line of vertical bars and yellow-greenish tint— worked to perfectly blend them into their shimmering watery home.
Young salmon live and grow up in the mountains until they reach a certain age. Then an internal switch trips, and they leave their small natal pools in the forest, turn downstream, and swim many miles away, out into a place they’ve never been before, the unknown Pacific. Salt water ocean, giant and wild and foreign.
There, the survivors will spend years ranging hundreds of miles out into the open sea, growing fat and long and silvery sleek.
Then, one day – no one knows how – they’re suddenly struck by an urgent feeling, an overwhelming urge to go home.
The call to go home isn’t simply an instinct to lay eggs and start the next generation. If it was, salmon would just pick the first freshwater stream they run across and head inland.
No, instead, each salmon will swim, search for and find, among all the water outlets along a thousand miles of California coast, the one stream that leads back to the pools where they hatched and spent their youth. Home.
How a salmon finds that one unique place among all the turnings, tributaries, and other beds of ferns and gravel is a mystery.
But when humans tag salmon in a particular creek hundreds of miles deep in a forest, the tagged salmon are found returning there, years later, once again.
The calling of home is so intense, it drives the fish to leave the sea and rewire most of their physiology (to switch from salt water to fresh). Then they run uphill against the current in a one-way life-or-death race for tens or even hundreds of miles, up a steadily narrowing gauntlet of obstacles.
To get home.
It’s hard to imagine a longing so intense it overrides all other things, a siren call, irresistible to ignore. A drive so intense one would be willing to lose the struggle to live in the process of trying.
We humans, who can feel so much, also have a tendency not to consider the inner workings of other animals, not when our own interests are at stake, and over time we’ve raised barriers in streams and creeks and rivers, and take water from them.
Biologists explain, when we do that, the salmon can’t find their way home. They’re left at sea, looking for a stream that no longer runs, or to circle in a disappearing pool below an unbreachable dam, trying to answer a call they can’t fulfill.
The small salmon in the photo above, a coho, was measured and then placed unharmed back in Mill Creek, with a tiny electronic chip the size of a grain of rice, to help biologists record its arrival, should it swim back upstream some future day.
That particular waterway has been restored for salmon, by volunteers and dedicated teams. Its upper reaches were once again reopened to returning fish, after many years. As yet, only a few salmon have come back, but there will be more. Because people who appreciate the call of home are working to ensure they can.
When we turn toward home ourselves on the drive after work, or take the long trip back to where we came for the holidays – it’s a reminder of the ways we’re connected to myriad other forms of homing life here.
Treasure home.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com