Nature’s GPS: Animal Navigation Research Between Biology and Engineering in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Interest in animal wayfinding did not disappear with the introduction of modern navigation technologies in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, as this chapter will show, during the Cold War it took on a new dimension with the establishment of behaviorist research programs and large-scale funding schemes by engineering, space, and military organizations. This chapter looks at this new liaison between animal behavior researchers and engineers. In particular, it highlights the fascination with wild migratory animals’ ability to navigate over vast distances and the role of related biological research in shaping visions of global mobility and communication as something natural rather than human-made. In the historiography on globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of global communication and positioning networks, increasingly based on satellite technology, has played a dominant role. Historians of the global environment, too, have tapped into this narrative. Yet, in this context, animals and biologists have mostly been studied as users of globalized technical systems, for instance in the case of animal tracking by satellite, a practice that became increasingly important in wildlife management during the 1970s. This chapter shifts the focus back to animal researchers as actors in postwar and Cold War infrastructures of technological globalization. Skills of the animals they studied served as sources of inspiration for engineers. In this, wild migratory animals—here defined as animals that retained their natural migratory behavior, although hard to study and often replaced with “substitute” animals such as captured members of the same species or homing birds like pigeons—were seen as key to understanding alternative forms of potentially global navigation. The legacy of this relatively unknown period of cooperation between engineers and biologists is visible in both fields up to today. Looking at its history highlights the significant extent to which research into wild animal behavior has presented an important source of inspiration for the development of seamless and global mobility and communication since World War II.