Animals navigate better than they should be able to and we still can’t fully explain it. The authors track through the evidence: Bees using polarized light and dancing directions to a hive, monarchs three generations removed finding one Mexican forest, salmon returning to a natal stream by smell, sea turtles reading the earth’s magnetic field as a grid, birds carrying a star map and a magnetic compass and a sun compass and switching between them. It’s written as a detective story about the experiments — like, how you actually test whether a bird is using stars (you’ll probably need a planetarium).
Nature’s Compass