CHAPTER IV 



THE MIGRATIONS OF BIRDS 



HE sudden appearance of certain familiar birds in spring and their 

 disappearance at the close of summer has excited the attention and 

 interest of all classes of observers from the earliest times. " The stork 

 in the heaven," says the prophet Jeremiah, "knoweth her appointed 

 time ; and the turtle and the crane, and the swallow observe the time of their com- 

 ing." Much curious speculation has been indulged in to account for this periodic 

 appearance and disappearance, one ingenious writer of the early part of the eight- 

 eenth century arguing that when the birds leave in the fall they retire to the moon. 

 He presumed that they required about two months in passing thither, and that, 

 after arriving above the lower regions of the air they will have no occasion for 

 food. Concerning the great distance, he adds, "Between the moon and the 

 earth, if any shall still remain unsatisfied, I leave only this to his consider- 

 ation, whether there may not be some concrete bodies at much less distance 

 than the moon, which may be the recesses of these creatures, and serve for little 

 else but their entertainment," just as the rocky islands of the sea which he 

 says are "of no other manifest use than for sea fowl to rest and breed upon" ! 

 Hardly less absurd but wonderfully more persistent has been the notion that 

 birds hibernate during the winter in hollow trees, caves, and holes, and, at least 

 in the case of Swallows, in the mud at the bottoms of lakes and ponds. Linnaeus 

 and Cuvier, as well as a great number of lesser lights, believed that Swallows 

 spent the winter in a torpid state in mud, and even as late as 1878 a writer in a 

 prominent natural history journal in this country described the finding, in mid- 

 winter, of two Swallows in the mud at the bottom of a spring in a logging camp in 

 Maine. When taken out they are said to have revived and to have flown about 

 in a warm room. For the benefit of those who still hold this view and there 

 are such it may be acknowledged that we do not yet know the winter home of 

 our Chimney Swift, Bank Swallow, and Cliff Swallow, though it may be added 

 that when they return to us in spring they have enjoyed a complete moult, which 

 would seem to be a sufficiently severe strain without the addition of a winter 

 spent in a state of torpor ! 



These absurd ideas have gradually given way to more rational views, and at 

 the present time the whereabouts of a great majority of our birds is known 

 accurately for the entire year. Their coming and going on these long journeys 

 has been under intelligent, though often desultory, observation for more than a 

 century and, although we have learned much, it seems likely that we are hardly 

 advanced beyond the borderland of this intricate and fascinating subject. 

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