Explore "The Wit of a Duck" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense -- the home sense -- which operates unerringly. I saw this illustrated one spring in the case of a mallard drake.
My son had two ducks, and to mate with them he procured a drake of a neighbor who lived two miles south of us. He brought the drake home in a bag. The bird had no opportunity to see the road along which it was carried, or to get the general direction, except at the time of starting, when the boy carried him a few rods openly.