Nobody knows how it happened: An indoor house cat who got lost on a family excursion manageing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown 

Even Scientists are baffled by how holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early november became seperated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach Fla., appeared on new year’s eve staggering, week, and emaciated in a backyard about a mile from the Richters house in West Palm Beach.

 Are you sure its the same cat  wandered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays  and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

. . . holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur  but also an implanted microchip to identify her.

“I really beleive these stories, but their just hard to explain ” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral Ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter  I have no data for this.”

Their is  in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles, and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Scientists say it is more comon, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.

Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sence smells across long distances. “let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the North, so they move in a southerly direction,  Dr. Bateson said.

Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”