Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (9780593133248): How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Yong Ed

Author:Yong, Ed [Yong, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780593133231
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

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When I try to click with my tongue, the sound has a muffled wetness to it, like a stone being thrown into a pond. When Daniel Kish clicks, the sound is sharper, crisper, and much louder. It is the sound of someone snapping their fingers, a sound that will make you snap to attention. It’s a sound that Kish has been practicing for almost all of his life.

Born in 1966 with an aggressive form of eye cancer, Kish had his right eye removed at 7 months, and his left at 13 months. Shortly after he lost his second eye, he started clicking. At the age of two, he would routinely climb out of his crib and explore his house. One night, he crawled out of his bedroom window, dropped into a flower bed, and toddled around the backyard, clicking as he went. He remembers sensing the acoustically transparent chain-link fence, and the large house on the other side. He remembers climbing the fence, and then others like it, until a neighbor finally called the police, who brought him home. It wasn’t till much later that Kish learned what echolocation was, or that he’d been doing it for about as long as he’d been walking.

Now in his 50s, Kish is still clicking and still using the rebounding echoes to perceive the world. I meet him at his house in Long Beach, California, where he lives by himself. Inside, he doesn’t need to echolocate; he knows exactly where everything is. But when we go for a walk, the clicks come into play. Kish walks briskly and confidently, using a long cane to sense obstacles at ground level and echolocation to sense everything else. As we head down a residential street, he accurately narrates everything that we pass. He can tell where each house begins and ends. He can locate porches and shrubbery. He knows where cars are parked along the road. An overgrown tree stretches a large branch across the sidewalk, and although my natural inclination is to warn Kish about it, I don’t need to. He ducks, effortlessly. “If I wasn’t echolocating, I’d have definitely bumped into that,” he tells me.

Besides bats and odontocetes, several animals use a simpler form of echolocation. Small mammals might make ultrasonic clicks to find their way around, including various shrews, the solenodons of the Caribbean (which look like shrews), and the tenrecs of Madagascar (which look like hedgehogs). Certain fruit bats, which supposedly don’t echolocate, create clicking noises with their wings and can use these to distinguish different textures. The oilbird, a large South American fruit-eater, makes audible clicks, perhaps to navigate the caves in which it roosts. Swiftlets, small insect-eating birds, might click for the same reason. And as Kish and many other people demonstrate, humans can navigate with echoes, too.[*21]

Human echolocation isn’t as sophisticated as that of a bat or a dolphin, but as Kish likes to point out, those species have a several-million-year head start. And Kish does have a skill that Zipper the bat and Kina the false killer whale lack—language.

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