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There was a time people did not know what caused birds to disappear over the winter. Some people thought they changed into other animals, that they hibernated or even that they migrated to the moon for the winter.
The Portuguese historian Antonio Galvano in 1563 noted that hummingbirds in Mexico …
live of the dew, and the juyce of flowers and roses. They sleepe every yeere in the moneth of October, sitting upon a little bough in a warme and close place: they revive or wake againe in the moneth of April after that the flowers be sprung, and therefore they call them the revived birds.
Other people thought that birds, such as swallows, hibernated in mud at the bottoms of ponds. This idea was not as ridiculous as it sounds, for it was based on some known facts. For example, swallows gathered at the edges of ponds in the fall, then seemed to disappear. It was not much of a stretch to speculate that they dove to the bottom of the pond and hibernated the winter away like frogs. People knew frogs hibernated in the mud, so why not birds too?
The cartographer Olaus Magnus believed the swallow-mud-hibernation theory. He claimed in 1555 that this fact was well-known to every fishers. The inexperienced ones, he said, hauled hibernating swallows up in nets, hoping to revive them, which did not work. More experienced fishers, he claimed, left the swallows alone because they knew the birds would revive themselves in the spring.
People also knew that caterpillars transformed into butterflies, and that tadpoles transformed into frogs. Some birds certainly transformed their plumage at different times of the year, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that birds transformed their bodies, too – and in the fourth century B.C., Aristotle believed that some birds hibernated but that others transformed into different species. He thought redstarts must transform into robins because redstarts disappear from Greece at the same time the robins appear.
Francis Godwin wrote the first science fiction book, “The Man in the Moone,” in 1638, telling of a Spanish explorer, Domingo Gonsales, who got stuck on an uninhabited island. He lashed some gansas (swans) together and they carried him to other lands. But when he tried to fly during the swans’ migration period, they flew up and up and up and carried him to the moon – and since many people had seen flocks of birds flying south in front of the moon as it hung low over the horizon, this may have evidence to many that the idea wasn’t just fiction.
One such believer was the learned professor Charles Morton. In 1684, Morton rejected the idea that birds migrate to places on Earth. Morton was a Puritan, a natural philosopher (what we today call science today was then called “natural philosophy”) and a dissenter to the ideas of the Anglican church. He set up a highly acclaimed school in England, but was persecuted and emigrated to New England in 1686. He almost became the president of Harvard College, but the Massachusetts Bay colony had recently combined with other colonies to become the Dominion of New England, ruled by a royal governor. Because royal ties were becoming reestablished, people did not want to incur the wrath of the king by appointing a dissenter.
Instead, Morton became minister of the First Church in Charlestown (now called Christ Church Charlestown). At one point he was prosecuted for a seditious sermon that claimed the old colony charter was still valid, and that God would soon restore it. (He was eventually acquitted of these charges.) His book Compendium Physicae was used as a textbook on astronomy and physics at Harvard and Yale for 40 years. It tackled topics such as heat, light, motion, gravity, magnetism and mechanics.
Morton is also thought to be the author of an anonymous pamphlet that posits that birds overwinter on the moon. He based his argument on science and scripture, noting that lack of food and changes in the weather must force birds to either hibernate or migrate (or both). He thought birds would not be able to breathe if they hibernated underwater and noted that birds in autumn just seem to disappear straight up into the sky; and since there was no air resistance in the atmosphere, birds can fly fast in the heavens. He therefore reasoned that birds must climb to the nearest celestial body – the moon:
The Stork (and the rest of Season-observing Birds) does go unto, and remain in some one of the [heavenly] Bodies, and that must be the Moon, which is most likely, because nearest, and bearing most Relation to our Earth.
He calculated that birds spend two months flying to the moon, four months overwintering there, two months flying back to earth, and four months in their earthly summer breeding grounds. He reasoned that birds probably sleep during most of their flight, awakening only when the cold air of the moon or Earth hits them. Like bears that overwinter in Greenland, he thought birds could live off their body fat while flying. Once they arrived on the moon, there would be ample water and vegetation to support them. (People of the time believed the moon was much like the Earth, with oceans, rivers, mountains and plants. After all, god would not have created the planets and moons just to have them sit there deserted.)
Over time, however, evidence mounted that something else was happening. In 1882, a hunter in Germany shot a white stork. This stork had a spear already embedded in its neck. The hunter took the speared stork to the nearby university. There, a botanist identified the spear as coming from the upper Nile in what is today Sudan. This mind-boggling discovery meant the stork had flown about 2,500 miles with a spear in its neck. To this day, the stork is called the Pfeilstorck (arrow stork). It is on display at the University of Rostock.
As Europeans colonized the Southern Hemisphere, natural philosophers could see European birds taking up their winter haunts in Africa and South America. More and more people began to realize birds migrated. Some people still had a hard time believing small birds could travel great distances on their own, though, and thought they must hitch a ride on the backs of larger birds such as storks and cranes.
Ernest Ingersoll writes in 1923 of a Swedish traveler who had this theory in the 1800s:
Those little birds are much too weak to make the long sea-journey with their own strength. This they know very well, and therefore wait for the storks and cranes and other large birds, and settle themselves upon their backs. In this way they allow themselves to be borne over the sea. The large birds submit to it willingly, for they like their little guests who by their merry twitterings help to kill the time on the long voyage.
In 1899, Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, a Dane, began putting metal rings around the legs of starlings, storks, herons, gulls and ducks. He wanted to “generate information about various birds’ journeys, longevity, age differences, geographical breeding, and much more.” It was his efforts that opened the door to our modern understanding of bird migration routes.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
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