Disappears suddenly. An instant is there, pecking between the weed, and the next, the flight raises and does not look again for months. No one stops it, nobody follows. He simply leaves.
The Disappearance of certain birds In concrete times of the year it was for centuries an authentic headache. What happens when a bird disappears from sight and flys is something that, until not so ago, it was explained with ideas far from reality.
And then something happened that marked a before and after in that millenary uncertainty. An fWOODEN LECA crossed the European sky in 1822. He did not do it alone: he was stuck in the neck of a stork. The origin of the concept is attributed to that scene PFEILSTORCHa German word that unites “milt and stork.
The relevant thing was not the projectile, but what it demonstrated. For centuries, no one had had a solid test on the whereabouts of birds during the cold months. Until a injured bird landed with the response embedded in the body.
Lunar stork did not endure in front of such a forceful test
The bird was killed in the north of Germanynear the town of Klütz. Your body is dissected And it is still preserved today in the Rostock University. I had an African arrow of more than 80 centimeters.
The trip of the trip was clear: there was Cross more than 3,000 kilometers From some point in the center of the African continent to Europe with a perforated neck, surviving the journey. That image, beyond the unusual, resolved a mystery.
For centuries, the explanations about the disappearance of the birds had oscillated between the assumption, the badly routed logic and the fantasy. In the seventeenth century, the English scientist Charles Morton lHe bequeathed to propose that the storks passed the winter in the Moon.
His reasoning, although it sounds exaggerated, followed a plot that intended to be scientific: if no one knew where they were, and since the moon was visible but unattainable, that must be the answer. He even calculated how long it took to arrivebased on accumulated body fat and a constant speed for weeks.
It was not the only extravagant theory. Some naturalists thought that certain bird species simply They changed shape or I know hid in the mud during winter, as proposed Olaus Magus.
Aristotlethat he had written several ideas about animal behavior, explicitly rejected that supposed transformation, although he proposed that some birds hid into cracks to hibernate. In his words, collected in Animal history, He justified the belief in Dwarf Peoples of the South because “there is actually a breed of dwarf men, and horses of small proportion, and men live in caves under the ground.”
The mystery gave way to scientific observation and precise monitoring
None of that could be compared to the finding of that wounded stork. Since then, they were at least another 25 similar birds In different parts of Germany, also with arrows of African origin. Some belonged to other large species, all capable of completing the trip with wounds that did not affect vital organs or compromised their flight.
In the absence of better tracking methods, these arrows acted as involuntary markers, as if they were Tags hanging from their bodies to point out where they came from.
Migration, until that moment, had been a suspicion, not a certainty. The introduction of metal rings At the end of the 19th century by the Danish Hans Christian Mortensen It finally allowed the path systematically.
With this method it was confirmed that the birds that disappeared in autumn were the same that returned months later. The trip did not respond to any inexplicable mystery: It was real, long and repeated every year.
The episode of PFEILSTORCH He opened a way of knowledge that, since then, has not stopped expanding. And although today there are radars, satellites and tracking devices, it all started with a stork that flew more than 3,000 kilometers with an arrow stuck in the neck.
There was no need to invoke the moon, or imagine transformations. It was enough to look at the body of an animal that had returned from where others could only speculate.
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