Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year 2019

Incredible Journeys: Exploring the Wonders of Animal Navigation

David Barrie is an experienced navigator, and he’s also fascinated by animal behaviour.

Researching Incredible Journeys (Supernavigators in North America) enabled him to combine these two great interests - and it proved to be a wonderful journey of discovery.

His main aim was to share the amazing things he had learned with his readers, but he also wanted to celebrate the ingenuity, skill and dedication of the scientists who have been slowly unravelling the many mysteries of animal navigation.

David’s research took him right round the world and gave him the chance to interview many of the leading experts in the field of animal navigation studies, and also to witness some fascinating experiments at first hand.

Incredible Journeys reveals the extraordinary variety of tools that animals - as diverse as ants, beetles, moths, butterflies, lobsters, birds, sea turtles, bats and fish - use to find their way around.

These include landmarks, the light of the sun, moon and stars, the earth’s magnetism, sounds and smells - and even electric fields.

But many great mysteries remain - not least how exactly animals detect and make use of the earth’s magnetic field.

Incredible Journeys also explores the discoveries of the many neuroscientists who are investigating the brain circuitry that enables animals - including us humans - to navigate. These circuits also support our ability to maintain social relationships and engage in abstract thought - and even to exercise our creativity. To stay healthy, they must be constantly exercised - and that means that our increasing reliance on electronic gadgets to find our way around is fraught with risk.

Incredible Journeys raises important questions about our rapidly changing relationship with the world around us. While indigenous peoples like the Inuit of Arctic Canada or the islanders of the Pacific Ocean can still navigate without so much as a map or compass, most of us city-dwellers can barely find our way without the help of our GPS-enabled cell phones. By abandoning traditional navigational methods, we’re not just losing touch with the natural world. We’re jeopardising our physical and mental health and undermining our spiritual well-being too.

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Supernavigators won the Gold and Silver Nautilus Book Awards for 2019. The Gold was in the ‘nature and animals’ category, and the Silver in ‘young adult non-fiction’.

David was honoured that the Royal Institute of Navigation awarded him its Certificate of Achievement in 2021 for his ‘acclaimed work in accessible communication of scientific research into how animals navigate, especially in [his] recent book, Incredible Journeys’.

Incredible Journeys is published by Hodder and Stoughton in London, and Supernavigators by The Experiment in New York City. The UK and US paperback editions came out in 2020.

Spanish, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish and Russian translations have appeared and a children’s version is to be published in the US in 2025.

To keep track of some of David’s latest discoveries, have a look at the blog page.

For other news and views, follow David on Twitter/X @barrieauthor.

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What reviewers said:

…in this often immensely entertaining book David Barrie explores the latest scientific research into how [animals navigate]…What is engrossing about Barrie’s book is not just the remarkable behaviour of the individual animals…but the often painstaking detective work undertaken by the scientists seeking to discover how they operate, many of whom Barrie reports back from in person…he is an admirably reliable and assiduous guide to what we do and don’t yet know. And some of the most amazing feats in the book are left to humans — sea-faring Eskimos, for instance, who know exactly which fjord to turn into in the fog from the subtly different sounds made by individual nesting snow buntings. This is just one moment, among many, when all you can do is gasp in amazement. Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times

[Barrie] is passionate about navigation and describes in delightful detail the myriad ways in which animals get around. . . . The number of animals traveling long distances, from insects to sea turtles, and from eels to whales, is just astonishing, as are the many ways in which they find their way…Whenever our smartphone lacks satellite service, we still need to tap into our natural navigational capacities even if they are no match for those of the supernavigators in this eye-opening book. Frans de Waal, The New York Times Book Review

Only a sailor could relate the navigational powers of both humans and animals with such appreciation, excitement and precision. Thank you, David Barrie, for taking us along on these riveting journeys by sail and wing, hoof and flipper. We arrive surprised, delighted, and awed. Cy Montgomery, author of How to be a Good Creature and The Soul of an Octopus

Barrie (Sextant)…masterfully conveys new discoveries about animal navigation in this impressive popular science work. In addition to the usual suspects, such as the Monarch butterfly, Barrie relates the achievements of more obscure creatures, including the desert ants of North Africa, which use the sun as a compass. He notes that insect brains, despite their tiny size, consistently “generate an impressively diverse repertoire of navigational behavior.” Even the lowly dung beetle is featured, as it is able to roll balls of dung in a straight line—backwards. Each chapter contains a surprise even for those familiar with the topic, such as the theory that homing pigeons make use of smell to navigate. Barrie cleverly stokes readers’ curiosity about the subject with short sections at the end of each chapter describing even more remarkable, still unexplained feats, such as two-inch-long dragonflies that fly at least 3,500 kilometers over the ocean without stopping. More generally, he expresses a wish that what’s been learned… might overcome anthropocentrism, driving home that “we are animals too.” This is a must-read for anyone fascinated with the wonders of nature. Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

…a wonderfully refreshing read…flawlessly intertwines personal stories from Barrie’s past with easily digestible accounts of the academic progress in the field of animal navigation, as well as remarkable tales of human navigation…Barrie writes for a general audience, breaking down the complex field of research that is animal navigation, and exploring it in a way that engages the reader no matter how limited their background. From beetles to ants to seals and bears…every chapter presents the reader with new reasons to admire these creatures…At a time when we humans seem to be becoming…decoupled from the environment and living things…I find this book to be a delightful way to reconnect and would thoroughly encourage others to pick up a copy. Navigation News

There seems to be no limit to the resourcefulness with which insects, birds, fish and mammals navigate their way through the world. Consider the desert ant. After meandering hundreds of metres from its nest, the ant manages to scuttle home in a straight line across unfamiliar ground. Honeybees use an internal clock and sensitivity to polarised light to remember the location of food, communicating it to their hive through their famous waggle dance. …. David Barrie's Incredible Journeys is brimful of such wayfinding wonders. But it is as valuable for what it reveals about our ignorance. No one knows how those terns stay the course across vast expanses of open ocean, nor how juvenile European cuckoos find their way to their wintering grounds in Africa for the first time without a guiding parent. Pigeons are known to have a keen sense of smell, but, despite decades of research, we can't agree if they use it to navigate. The consensus is that many animals can sense Earth's magnetic field, but how they use it remains unclear….Many biologists have spent their lives wrestling with these mysteries, and their obsessive ponderings and ingenious experiments are as fascinating as the behaviours they study… Barrie's passion makes him an engaging guide, flitting from fact to anecdote like a butterfly hunting for nectar. He is no less animated about the skills of early humans, who explored most of our planet and colonised much of it "without the help of any tools, apart from their finely tuned senses and native wits". In the age of GPS, it is easy to forget that modern humans possess the same senses and wits, though we use them less and less. How our brains form the cognitive maps that allow us to remember routes and places is as mysterious - and in many ways as remarkable - as the migration of the Arctic tern or the dead reckoning of the desert ant. Let's hope that by the time spatial neuroscience has revealed more about our wayfinding faculties, we still know how to use them. Michael Bond, New Scientist

How does the blind Mexican cave fish …navigate convoluted pools, or the tiny blackpoll warbler… fly non-stop for 2,770 kilometres over open ocean? In this exhilarating popular study, David Barrie reveals the roots of navigational prowess — such as the adapted eye and biological clock of the desert ant Cataglyphis, which function as a compass oriented to the Sun, or the myriad species that use olfaction, Earth’s magnetism, sonar or cognitive mapping to find their way. The navigational nous of humans from astronauts to Indigenous peoples gets a look-in, too. Nature

In Supernavigators, David Barrie tells astounding tales of how various animals navigate the world and the equally intriguing stories of the scientists who study them. Ants and bees, we learn, can orient themselves by detecting the polarization of the Sun, whereas dung beetles use moonlight and the Milky Way as their guide. Barrie, an expert sailor, explains the challenge of navigating across a vast ocean without a compass and discusses how the animals that do so maintain a steady course using odor, soundscapes, and the weak Earth magnetic field. Here, he relates the story of a pigeon race that went awry in 1997, when infrasound shock waves generated by a Concorde supersonic transport airliner led tens of thousands of the birds—which are known for their navigational acumen—off course. Many were never seen again. Researching animal navigation has practical benefits as well. Understanding when and where animals that serve as vectors for viruses and bacteria move can help public health experts predict the spread of certain diseases. The extraordinary sensory mechanisms of animals could also inspire technologies, including radar, machine vision, robotics, and self-driving cars. Barrie argues that returning to more traditional ways of navigating connects us back to nature: “Rather than automatically relying on GPS…we should open our eyes and exercise our brains,” he writes. “Unless we want to lose our navigational skills altogether, we must learn again how to speak the language of the earth”. Science

In times gone by, humans navigated by the stars, tracked the path of the sun or learnt long-established routes across landscapes and seas through an apprenticeship in careful observation. We have now largely abandoned these old skills in favour of modern technology. Animals and insects, however, remain capable of mind-boggling journeys, finding their way by using the Earth’s magnetic field, the Milky Way, the moon, sound and, in the case of salmon, their sense of smell. David Barrie tracks the path of the monarch butterfly while it coasts across continents, follows a dung beetle as it travels…in an entirely straight line and marvels at homebound desert ants who find their way home through sand…David is an engaging explorer, enthusiastically celebrating the skill of creatures as fascinating as they are enterprising. Sunday Express

A wonderful combination of science and travel writing that deserves to win awards - David Barrie’s book on animal migration is popular science writing at its very best. Butterfly News, journal of Butterfly Conservation

Navigate your way to your local bookstore and pick up this fantastic book, which covers everything from migrating birds and sea turtles to ants and dung beetles. Barrie's got the human element covered, too: He's a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Ecowatch

Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men who Mapped the World’s Oceans

Sextant is hard to categorise: it’s part memoir, part history, part adventure story, part popular science. And there are philosophical reflections too - especially about the ways in which modern technology is our corroding our relationship with the natural world.

Drawing on the journal David kept at the time, Sextant recalls the life-changing experience of sailing across the Atlantic back in 1973 when he was 19 years old. In those days taking sights of the sun and stars with a sextant was the only reliable way to fix your position on the open ocean in a small boat. GPS was still a long way in the future. During that voyage David learned how to use a sextant from a remarkable retired Royal Navy officer, Colin McMullen. The book is dedicated to his memory.

Sextant also celebrates the key role of celestial navigation in the exploration and mapping of the world’s oceans. It recounts the heroic achievements of great navigators like Bougainville, Cook, Bligh, La Pérouse, Vancouver, Flinders and FitzRoy, many of whom are now almost forgotten. The amazing small-boat voyages of Joshua Slocum and Ernest Shackleton are in there too, alongside David’s own maritime adventures, though these - he freely admits - are far more modest. The book ends with some profound reflections on how the electronic revolution has brought what David calls the ‘Golden Age of Celestial Navigation’ to an end - and what that revolutionary change may mean for all of us.

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Sextant is published by William Collins in the UK, and by William Morrow in the USA.

Sextant was awarded the Certificate of Achievement of the Royal Institute of Navigation in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Mountbatten Book Prize.

It has been translated in Italian and German.

What reviewers said:

‘As lovingly and painstakingly constructed as the navigator’s one irreplaceable talisman…A hymn to a now-vanishing feature of maritime life, a finely-chased reminder of how much we all owe to that one small piece of apparatus. Exquisite.’ Simon Winchester, author of Pacific, Atlantic, and The Surgeon of Crowthorne

‘It gives the reader the idea that he is having a conversation with someone who knows his subject intimately, but wears his knowledge lightly…An excellent present for anyone even vaguely interested in the stars, or the history of exploration, or sailing small boats on big oceans, or come to think of it, anyone at all. And buy a copy for yourself while you’re about it.’ Marine Quarterly

‘Barrie’s writing is exhilarating and suffused with a sense of adventure. A fascinating read.’ Financial Times

‘..what gives Sextant its special colour is Barrie’s own experience as a sailor…His book is an elegy for the days before GPS made simultaneous geniuses and idiots of us all…The young Barrie’s sense of wonder…and his discovery of the patterns of the sun and stars, run through the book and inform his appreciation of the achievements of the great sailors…He invites anyone near the sea, and above all on a boat, to turn away from their screens and look around.’ Sunday Express

‘As an enthusiastic and experienced sailor. [Barrie] tells a bracing historical tale of how captains, cartographers, explorers, adventurers, ocean racers and seamen cast adrift have depended on an essential piece of kit…before it was supplanted by high-tech offshore navigation’. The Times

‘David Barrie’s lively, eloquent history of the sextant…A fascinating read for both landlubbers and sailors alike.’ Geographical Magazine

‘A joy to read…one of the most interesting books I’ve read in years’. Flying Fish, magazine of the Ocean Cruising Club.

‘A paean to an age before digital technology, like GPS, placed a plane of user-friendly translucency between us and the physical world.’ Classic Boat

‘This passionate and powerful work…seamlessly weaves in tales of the great navigators…with wider developments in science and society.’ Nautilus

‘I’ve been…reading David Barrie’s excellent new book Sextant…I’m hooked: I’ve bought a second-hand sextant, calibrated it and started worrying the neighbours by squinting at Polaris from our front drive.’ Editorial, Practical Boat Owner

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Finally, it is worth mentioning that David’s devotion to the work of the Victorian critic, artist, social reformer and writer, John Ruskin, prompted him to produce an abridged, single-volume edition of Ruskin’s extraordinary five-volume magnum opus, Modern Painters. That was back in 1987, when he was still a diplomat, and the publisher was André Deutsch - one of the last independent publishing houses in London. The book was very well received, but is sadly now out of print.