living on the wind across the hemisphere with migratory birds

They forage for food, seek shelter from predators and the weather they defend territories, look for mates, and tend to their nests.Īnother type of movement is the one that every bird makes once in their lifetime. Instead, a range of distinct movement types and patterns are seen among the Earth’s approximately 10,000 bird species.Īt the smallest geographic and temporal scales, birds move around in their local habitats over the course of a day. But they don’t just fly around the planet aimlessly. Compared to us lowly Earthbound creatures, birds are free to go where they please. Bird Movementsīirds are incredibly mobile beasts, given that they fly. Instead, this will be an overview of migration in birds. This is a big topic, so I can’t do a deep dive into “all things migration” here. Migration is one of the most amazing things about birds-their seemingly miraculous feats of orientation and endurance on long-distance, annual flights. We live in a time when research on bird migration has given us amazingly detailed pictures of just where birds are going and how they get there.

We now have amazing tools like GPS trackers that provide precise location info without any harm to the animals. These days, we need not puncture birds with arrows to understand their annual movements, thankfully. To survive getting impaled with an arrow and then flying thousands of miles north with the arrow stuck in your body? Crazy. About 25 of these pfeilstorchs have turned up since 1822.

This bird was dubbed a pfeilstorch, which means ‘arrow stork’ in German.Īmazingly, this bird was not one-of-a-kind.

This lucky/not-so-lucky stork gave the world its first solid piece of evidence that birds in the northern hemisphere often undertake long journeys south in the winter. And it turned out that the arrow came from Central Africa. Another explanation in ye olden days was that birds hibernate at the bottom of the sea or while buried in swamp mud.īut in 1822, a hunter in Germany shot and killed a White Stork and found that the bird already had a large arrow lodged in its neck.

Silly, right? Well, sure, but before scientists had studied birds (and the moon) more carefully, this would have been about as reasonable as any other answer. The answer given in the pamphlet? Birds fly to the moon in the winter. Or, feeling more helpful, they might refer you to a pamphlet published in 1703, succinctly titled “An Essay Toward the Probable Solution of this Question: Whence Come the Stork and the Turtledove, the Crane, and the Swallow, when they Know and Observe the Appointed Time of their Coming.” If you asked a European person in the 1700s “Where do birds go in the winter?” they might just look at you with a blank stare, then shake their head and walk away.

Living on the wind across the hemisphere with migratory birds