Love this closing quote at the BBC site in a story by Victoria Gill: “If the planet was larger, they would probably migrate even further.” Well, one can’t condemn respect for a quote’s verbatim delivery. This one flubs the subjunctive and it uses further when farther is better usage in my grammar book, but it does the job.
Gill’s story inspiration is a paper on the long travels of the northern wheatear, by professors writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. These birds do move – from Alaska’s and Canada’s arctic to northern Africa and back every year, some of them traversing about 2200 miles (3500 km) of the North Atlantic on their little wings. Weird thing is that from North America some of’em head west through Siberia and Arabia to get there, others head east to the UK and hang a right.
Other northern wheatear stories:
- Live Science – Charles Q. Choi: Flight record: Songbirds trek 9,000 miles to Africa; Nice, but is this really a record? Maybe for songbirds. A few seabirds go farther. The hed misleads, but steady-handed reporter Choi gets things right in his story. Also here is answer to a question many may ask: how does one put a tracking device on a bird so teeny, without overburdening the poor thing?
- Postmedia News via Canada.com – Heather Yundt: Arctic Canada songbird’s migration to Africa one of the longest in the world.
- AFP via Melbourne Herald-Sun : The northern wheatear proves to be a long-distance champion ;
- Daily Mail – Rob Waugh: Tiny bird which weights same as two spoons of sugar baffles scientists with 18,000 mile return migration ;
Here’s a question I didn’t notice answered anywhere. Millions of years ago Africa abutted North America. Is this not an example of evolution slowly adjusting a migration route to accommodate continental drift when, if anything intelligent were in charge, they’d be redirected to an easier seasonal relo?
Grist for the Mill:
University of Guelph (Canada) Press Release wherein one learns that this songbird weighs “on average no more than two tablespoons of salt” and that’s a metric so vivid one figures the press officer or somebody there does love the written word. It’s so good one can’t really blame reporters who took their analogy cue from this handout;
Biology Letters full paper ;
Uttterly Unrelated Eyepopper: At LiveScience, discovered while seeking out Choi’s story, is a flabbergasting picture of something called a wobbegong that LiveScience ME Jeanna Bryner posted. It’s a shark, and it’s eating another shark. You gotta see it. Who says wild animals are the noble and fulfilled ones, and domestic ones on farms or others on game parks to get shot at are the oppressed and stressed out ones? Not always, not hardly. Just sayin’ … it ain’t necessarily sentimentally so. One guesses this lunch-munched shark would’ve lasted longer in a big aquarium.
– Charlie Petit
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