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Crazy stuff: "white storks that are injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and return to Europe with the projectile stuck in their bodies", they
by ForceBru 1y ago
Crazy stuff: "white storks that are injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and return to Europe with the projectile stuck in their bodies", they apparently helped people in 1822 learn that birds migrate?! Was it not widely known before that? Cool!
- mapmeld 1y agoSome people thought that the birds flew to the moon in the winter!
- tremon 1y agoWell, how did they know that the spear didn't belong to the men in the moon then?
- eenridoku 1y agothat’s crazy, I read it in a book but can’t recall which one. In the same book they were going through the eels mistery about where they go to breed, hopefully we gonna find an eel with a spear in the neck one day
- cubefox 1y agoIt was likely widely believed before 1822 that birds migrate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926306
- grimgrin 1y agoA little further down it said this: > Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time.
- magospietato 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth From our late scientific-era perspective it's really difficult to appreciate how badly intuitive understanding of cause and effect can let us down.
- dawatchusay 1y agoIt wasn’t even accepted that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs until early 1990s
- andrewflnr 1y agoTo be fair, that was a genuinely crazy idea until the detailed evidence came in. The question itself only comes up after lots of relatively modern science. Similar for plate tectonics.
- lukan 1y agoErm, the evidence for an event that happened 60+ mio years ago and the evidence for an event happening every year that you can watch in real time now is maybe not quite comparable?
- wongarsu 1y agoBird migrations aren't that easy to observe with 1822 tech either. It's not like they could stick a GPS recorder on a bird, or mark a bird and follow it in a car. You can make local observations (many birds fly overhead, heading South-East) but with how difficult travel was it's not trivial to piece that together to the conclusion that birds travel from Europe all the way to Africa
- lukan 1y agoOr you could have talked to people who travel.
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- troupo 1y agoDon't forget that first trains were invented just 50 years prior. A journey of even 100 kilometers was far. E.g.: https://www.fastcompany.com/3024267/this-interactive-map-shows-how-far-you-could-travel-in-24-hours https://www.fastcompany.com/3024267/this-interactive-map-sho... The idea that something can casually travel thousands of kilometers was beyond the realm of fantastical
- lukan 1y agoBut people did had eyes to see how easily birds can ride the winds along the sky. And ships also existed from where birds flying in formations over the sea could be seen. edit: But it seems people did know since 3000 years, not all were trapped in superstition and ignorance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration
- Zigurd 1y agoTBF this is at least as much a story of the etymology of a German compound word as it is about natural science. This should become some kind of business jargon aphorism: "Focus groups are the arrow storks of user migration" or something like that.
- bazoom42 1y agoMigration was a theory but really been proven.