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”
I felt so bad for that hawk and had to look it up. The arrow was successfully removed.
I was going to say, that looks brutal AF but is potentially survivable if it was able to fly off from the initial shot. Fuck whatever jackass did this.
Hard to tell from the picture quality, but based on the tail barring to me it looks like an immature red tailed hawk. Poor baby.
(Although he was more about eagles)
Can ya link? I wanna read more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZFNZ792GQ
Upon closer inspection, is that a different bird?? Now I’m sad again.
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.
Fun fact: this is how bird migration was discovered. It was previously thought that birds hibernated until a stalk flew from Africa to Germany with an arrow in its neck.
