Space weather” and “Earth weather” both describe natural and often unpredictable phenomena, but the similarities stop there. While “Earth weather” can represent a range of water, wind, earth and solar events, “space weather” simply refers to variations in energy flow from the sun, explains Gulson-Castillo. Yong’s research has shaped how he has raised his own pet corgi, Typo, particularly when he learned of a study which found dogs become more optimistic when they are given two weeks of sniffing tasks – they thrive when permitted to fully utilise their powerful sense of smell. The two studies raise questions about the navigational decisions that birds make, says University of California, Irvine, biophysicist Thorsten Ritz, who was not involved in either study.

An Immense World by Ed Yong is an epic exploration of the unique “umwelt” of other creatures, from tree hoppers to singing frogs, who sense the world in vastly different ways to humans. It is also a plea for greater empathy with other species.

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But the question of exactly how birds navigate is difficult to answer because it involves imagining oneself with another organism’s sensory capabilities. And the nature of other animals’ reality will, at some level, remain a mystery to us, Ritz says. In both studies, the disruptive effects of altered geomagnetism were strongest during fall migration. In the fall and not the spring, more birds drifted with the wind, and geomagnetic disturbances were associated with vagrancy. The seasonality of these effects may not be a coincidence, Gulson-Castillo says, but rather a reflection of a younger, less-savvy migratory population in the fall. Juvenile birds that hatched in the spring would be taking their first migratory journeys then, and their internal sense of direction might not be as fine-tuned as for older birds that have flown the route before. Still, scientists don’t have a clear reason why these younger birds would leave more up to the wind, or how small errors could compound and lead to a vagrant bird. There is a signal across very different data sources, very different methods, suggesting that these extraterrestrial phenomena have real-time impacts on the organisms that can sense them,” says Eric Gulson-Castillo, a University of Michigan graduate student who led a study into the effects of space disturbances on bird migration. “We ourselves cannot directly sense them, but the birds can.”

These are big societal problems and they demand big societal solutions,” says Yong. Nevertheless, he shows that much noise and light pollution can be ameliorated by simple, practical tweaks. Swapping LED lights from blue/white hues to red means they are less harmful to bats and insects. Reducing ship speeds by just 12% in the Mediterranean has been shown to halve engine noise in the sea. Now, 65 years later, new research into avian navigation gives scientists another hunch about what might have happened. They’ve found that Earth’s weather isn’t the only thing that can cause birds to veer off course—space weather seems to impact birds’ internal GPS. Bursts of energy from the sun in the form of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are becoming more frequent and may affect how birds navigate. It is fascinating to see that if you now look at the large-scale behavior, it seems that fields of that magnitude actually do matter, that maybe birds get disturbed by them,” Ritz says. The studies both offer evidence that contradicts findings from controlled-lab experiments. In some of these prior studies, researchers concluded that magnetic disturbances 1,000 times stronger than the natural geomagnetic ones had no effect on birds’ internal bearings. There’s a surprising number of sensory biologists who are themselves neuro-atypical – they have something like face blindness or colour blindness,” he says. “Their different than ‘normal’ way of experiencing the world themselves might help them better empathise with other creatures who have those experiences. The core of this book is curiosity and empathy, understanding and valuing animals for their own sake, and trying to put ourselves in the shoes of creatures who are very different to us.”Our greatest sensory gift is our ability to think about the sensory worlds of other animals,” says Yong, a British-American writer who won the Pulitzer prize in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid pandemic. Primates’ ability to see red colours probably helped them find edible berries and tender rainforest leaves but later many great apes evolved patches of bare skin that flush red to send signals – usually sexual – to each other. Meanwhile, a giant squid’s eyes have evolved to be so large so they can detect one of their greatest foes, sperm whales, as they collide with jellyfish, which emit flashes of bioluminescence in the dark ocean. Even though humans don’t have magnetoreception, or the ability to sense magnetic fields, many animals do, including whales, turtles, fish and birds. Scientists have known for decades that birds use magnetic fields to find their bearings, but researchers didn’t understand what happens when these fields are unexpectedly disturbed. Using large data sets, two studies published earlier this year —one in Scientific Reports, and the other in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—paint a clearer picture of how birds respond to geomagnetic disturbances. Their labours have opened up hidden worlds, revealing how animal senses are not simply superbly adapted to their environments but have sometimes themselves driven evolution.