Migrating birds are baffling

OUR summer migrant birds are starting to leave and our winter visitors will soon be flying in from the north.

The knowledge that some birds migrate great distances is relatively recent,just more than a hundred years old, in fact. There were some clues before that — in 1822 a German nobleman noticed a white stork on his estate with a strange object sticking out of it, so he shot it and the object turned out to be an arrow from Central Africa. This was regarded as mysterious and inexplicable, nobody seriously believed the bird had flown from Africa to Germany.

Ornithologists in northern Europe started trapping birds and putting identification rings on their legs in the early years of the 20th century. In 1911 a swallow ringed in England was recovered in Natal in South Africa. Even this evidence was regarded as dubious. When a report was published in the journal British Birds an editorial note stated: “… it seems unreasonable to suppose that swallows proceed southwards down the east coast of Africa, as might be inferred from this record.”