AUTHOR’S NOTE
172 Words
AUTHOR’S NOTEThe study of birds has intrigued and puzzled ornithologists for centuries.
No one really knows why some travel three thousand miles in almost unbroken flight while the partridge and the pheasant will not move more than three miles from the place they were born.
March in England sees one of the most remarkable mass movements of birds. The great rook roosts after the winter when there are nightly gatherings of thousands. The foreign rooks go overseas to Scandinavia and Germany, the native rook starts nest building.
The tiny wren is a migrant who stays until the autumn and then flies to the South of France and Spain, crosses the Mediterranean and by some navigational knowledge of its own, crosses the Sahara and penetrates deep into the Continent of Africa.
Swallows leave in September and arrive eventually in the small kraal in Africa from which they set out seven or eight months later.
What gives them their fantastic sense of aerial navigation, unknown to Jean Cabot, unthought of by Vasco da Gama?
- Writer
