Alt text: a bird calmly sitting on an electrical wire, but there’s an arrow going straight trough its body. The caption says: “Until death, all defeat is psychological”
Alt text: a bird calmly sitting on an electrical wire, but there’s an arrow going straight trough its body. The caption says: “Until death, all defeat is psychological”
This is what it took for europeans to realize that storks migrate south in winter.
It used to be thought that they winter under frozen lakes, or maybe hibernate. Then in the 1800s a stork was found in germany flying around with an african style arrow in it.
Migration HAD been proposed before, but people kept dismissing the idea that they could fly long-distance, especially over the Mediterranean.
That is also why barnacle geese are called barnacle geese; they thought the adults died in winter and new adults emerged fully formed from barnacles in the spring.
Why barnacles? Apparently the barnacle shells attached to driftwood resembled bird shells to people.
Had other places already figured out the bird migration theory?
Some places had, I know in Oceania (I want to say Hawaii?) some islands have oral history about how they found the island they live on by following bird migration. The story is actually pretty wild, they rowed out as far and as fast as they could to try to follow the birds, but obviously birds fly faster than people row. So each year they navigated back out to the last spot the had seen the birds last year, waited for them to show up, and rowed like the dickens until they were out of sight again. It must have been an incredible feat to witness, especially when they finally made it to the island they’d spent years trying to locate, based only on the knowledge the birds had to be going somewhere.
It was specifically stork migration. The fact that some birds migrate was known many places, I’d guess deep into prehistory.