We humans have long been envious of the “birds of the air”; wondering where they go and what they do when they disappear from our neighborhoods. Almost as soon as humans started keeping written records, they wrote about migration; often in poetic terms. The ancients recorded mass bird movements in the Bible, other stories and in their art. Greek and Roman naturalist/philosophers such as Aristotle (Greek) and Pliny the Elder (Roman) described some of their observations of birds moving through local and nearby lands.

Some people (including scientists of the day) believed that when birds disappeared in autumn, they moved into tree hollows or buried themselves in mud like frogs, to hibernate throughout the winter and revive again in the spring. Aristotle wrote of transmutation; the changing of one species to another from season to season. The birds one sees in winter were really the summer birds in different plumage. And then there were those, as late as the 18th century, who proposed that birds flew to the moon for the winter. As people came to understand that larger birds migrated, they still found it hard to accept that small ones did also. If they did migrate, it must be by riding on a larger bird’s back.

Read the rest of the Scarths' column in our February issue...