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Zugunruhe, 2026 - rendered, work-in-progress
Cairn and weathervane, wrought iron and resin, 7’7” and 4’5”










Photos: Ahmed Mekawy.

The word “Zugunruhe” names a condition of migration anxiety. Used as a designation for the behavior of birds before their seasonal migrations, it connotes an instinct, a disruption to normalcy, and, through its naming, diagnoses a pattern - ironically, indicating something routine or typical. It manifests as restlessness, a generalized itch; it’s visible in the manic beating of the birds’ wings, in their excessive nocturnal activity, and at times, in a voracious appetite that can’t be satiated.

To better understand these behaviors, in 1966, scientists designed the Emlen funnel: a conical enclosure with an ink pad at its base. With it, they were able to track the fluttering wings of captive birds, whose ink strokes on the enclosure walls registered the test subjects’ agitated states and yielded new information about the meaning of Zugunruhe and avian migration. While the condition is characterized as a kind of mental/emotional predicament - not quite a disorder - it also indicates something pre-cognitive: a bird experiences restlessness and orientation anxiety before its conscious navigation begins. In instances of artificially induced Zugunruhe, such as those in the lab, researchers used a device called a Helmholtz coil to manipulate the direction of magnetic fields around their captive subjects. They then observed the birds’ attempts at re-orientation - described as a response to intense discomfort, some strange and urgent, deeply felt discrepancy that needs resolving, and that drives the subjects’ internal systems toward correction. 

Of course, to some extent, these sensations are entirely speculative, as no scientist on the team was, himself, a bird. But those scientists might have wondered, too, how such felt-discrepancies manifested in people, and what resolutions people might then be compelled to make. An assistant researcher, new on the job, contemplated the final year of his recently passed mother, who had displayed a similar kind of agitation that escalated prior to the very end of her life. He felt uneasy, recalling her distress at getting lost in familiar places, how she would fidget uncomfortably among people she once knew well, and how her confusion intensified at night. He imagined what messages she would have left in ink - what marks might have been made on the interior walls of her mind - had she been able to, in the way of these birds in the lab.

Subsequent studies suggested that migratory birds aren’t consulting an internal compass as they navigate geographically, through and around the experience of Zugunruhe, though a human observer might assume this at first glance. Instead, research has identified what is described as a ghostly, directional glow that these birds may actually see - a biological function of a protein in their eyes that allows them to perceive a luminous gradient, undulating along the inclination of magnetic field lines, which accentuates magnetic north and south. The cryptochrome protein and the quantum entanglement of electron pairs when blue light hits the retina mean that the Earth’s magnetic field renders an image before these birds’ very eyes. The way forward is revealed to them, visually. Rarely do we witness quantum “magic” working in concert with the fleshy organic processes of biology quite like this.

Like the ornithologists in the lab, we observe seemingly infinite and mysterious happenings in other people and creatures. Through these observations arise further questions, inquiries, deductions, and the naming of states and experiences in the other, from the outside. At times, we may even borrow the vocabulary of our own interiority or individual image in the identification of processes we don’t yet fully comprehend. We may analyze, experiment, and study, occasionally slipping into overidentification, projection, humanization, anthropomorphization, dehumanization, or other errors and even distortions in our efforts towards comprehension, to manufacture an illuminating glow in our own cognitive “field of vision”.

Long predating the first known publication of the term “Zugunruhe” in 1707, language for anxiety appeared as early as Latin Stoic philosophical texts, where anxiety, angor (this is not a perfect translation, but a proximate root), is loosely presented as a state of disorder distinct from the trait of anxiousness. It identifies, in essence, the condition of a troubled mind. “Anxiety neurosis” became the diagnosis terminology between the 19th and 20th centuries to designate the emotional and somatic presentations of such angst. And by 1980, psychology professionals had entered "Generalized Anxiety Disorder" into their formal registry of afflictions, adapting the previously incomplete terms to delineate a broad and diffuse unease, marked by features like hyperactivity. Over centuries, experts shuffled anxiety into the realm of mysteries that could, and ought to be, resolved by societies’ foremost treatments and practices. And along the way, some thinkers proposed that it might be less a disorder of the interior than a sensitivity to external, invisible pressures - that, not unlike Zugunruhe, something outside the anxious subject, which we may not all see with equal clarity, could be responsible for disquieting the mind and spirit. Predominant treatments and classifications, however, kept their attention turned inward.

Research indicates that the human brain may also process magnetic information, without surfacing it into awareness. When exposed to magnetic fields, some individuals exhibit increased Alpha brainwave activity, suggesting subliminal sensory processing. Beyond magnetoreception, there is a broad class of signals we receive without knowing it, and how those signals surface into consciousness are varied. They might range, for example, from a sudden conviction that something is amiss, to dread or compulsion, insatiable curiosity, hunger, movement, or a motivation to resolve a dissonance that we did not consciously originate. Where a biologically-provided function might step in to respond to and make sense of these experiences - say, the urge to scratch an itch - at other times, a conscious process of sense-making, interpretation, categorization, reckoning, or creativity might be the consequent move.

For phenomena that exceed our biological reach, we often externalize them into sensing functions: instruments or practices that might enable us to process information a migratory bird, for instance, is biologically wired to, like writing laws of navigation or detecting coordinates across time and distance. At times, these tools even acquire capacities that can seem to exceed their origins. For signals that are fundamentally ambiguous at the sources, what do we do with them? And what resolutions do these yield about the world, ourselves, and others?

Proto-compass tools, before being instrumentalized for navigation, had entirely different uses in clarifying the intrinsic properties of the universe. As far back as 2 BC, the lodestone - a magnetized ore called magnetite - was employed as a technology for divination. Someone, perhaps the distant ancestor’s ancestor of that same researcher in the ornithology lab, compelled by a desire to answer some unknown question or to alleviate the burdens of an unbearable existential anxiety - placed the lodestone on a plank in a wading pool, and witnessed it wobble, as if under possession, orienting clockwise and counter clockwise of its own volition, and interpreted its movements as answers to the universe’s unanswerable phenomena. Different from the meaning a cartographer would later extract to identify the direction of the earth’s magnetic poles, the diviner’s deductions were the result of an inexact, but still meaningful, technology. With it, he too gained a kind of curious insight. And the passing from divination to navigation - also an imperfect science - assumed a significance larger than itself, enshrined in our understanding of the world’s essential nature. Even the naming of magnetic north and south, which later came with this comprehension of Earth’s magnetic fields and its poles, is technically inverted, a result of arbitrarily deciding which way is which, in order to concretize a rule about how to name the poles of athe magnet. As a result, according to our current framing, the Earth's North Pole is actually its magnetic south.

In spite of its necessary involvement in our scientific understandings of Zugunruhe, and its codification in the experience of a migratory bird, according to research, the relationship between avian migration and magnetic fields - what may feel like a stable, intrinsic property of the universe, something you might reliably navigate or diagnose from - is still vulnerable to events at a massive scale. Atmospheric changes, such as a solar flare, can disrupt navigation for birds and other magnetoreceptive creatures, such as whales. And in those instances, can we confidently claim that what we witness in birds is simply mild distress, a case of a troubled mind? 

In 1997, in the excitement of a royal pigeon racing event from France to England, 60,000 birds vanished somewhere between departure and arrival. What felt like a reliable, fixed property of the world, vivid magnetic field lines, undisrupted by a Helmholz coil in a lab, led the birds astray in a near-mythological turn of events. There, bird racing enthusiasts wondered how to make sense of the massive disappearances. They may also have found themselves unsettled, questioning the forces of the sky and the affairs of nature as they knew them, and jostled into a process of re-orienting accordingly. Why? What now? Where next? Scientists later speculated that the cause, undetectable to the human ear, was a series of sonic shockwaves from a nearby airliner, disrupting the birds’ navigational senses - surely, inducing a mass Zugunruhe - and causing them to mysteriously disperse, forever lost and without a vision of where to go.

Our intuitions and ensuing practices regularly become axioms. With enough use, near anything - like the identification of an ailment or condition - can begin to seem as though it were always there, a sub-threshold process, only unmarked or unidentified, until given a name that helps us orient around it, whether or not we consciously recognize how, in doing so, we’ve also written ourselves into it. The “glow” we manufacture may be a real instrument built from real sensitivities. But without treating these as technologies with humility - imperfect and impermanent, like the lodestone - we risk losing the diviner’s posture.

Five years after the royal pigeon racing incident, an onlooker from the event wandered laps around his cul-de-sac, enjoying the afternoon in the company of his dog companion. He’d inherited his affinity for birds from his uncle, a scientist who’d insisted that birds could teach a man quite a bit about himself. To this man’s astonishment, his lost racing pigeon appeared in the sky above him that day, first an indiscernible fleck, then a flare. He was amazed, moved to great emotion, and wondered what this incredible appearing act - the sole returnee of 60,000 lost pigeons - might mean. From then on, he swore that laps around the cul-de-sac with his dog at four o'clock every Tuesday were sure to bring him good luck, a novel sense of direction. And so he did this for the following five years, strolling clockwise and counterclockwise around the circular end of his street. That is, until someone convinced him to relinquish his minor compulsion.