The Travels of Birds
“What becomes of the birds that are with us in summer? Where and how do they spend the winter? By what roadways do they travel to their winter haunts? Do they prefer to journey by land or by water, and how do they find the way?
“We need not think that we, or anybody else of our day, are the first to ask these questions, for it is many hundreds of years since they first began to puzzle thinking people. At first, lacking any real knowledge of the simplest facts of nature, and not having as yet trained the eye to correct seeing, the people did as the ignorant do to this day,—they imagined fabulous reasons. The more impossible and wonderful or unnatural, the better, for it takes a trained mind oftentimes to realize that the most natural way is the best, and that the simplest way is the most natural.
“It was in these far-back times that the foolish idea was started that the Swallows dived into the mud and there spent the winter, like the frogs.
“Another stranger idea was that small birds crossed large bodies of water as passengers on the backs of large birds, such as Cranes, Ducks, and Geese, for people did not know enough of the structure of birds to realize that the machinery of the tiny Humming-bird is as fit for flying long distances as that of the biggest birds that grow. Ideas like this have been believed until a comparatively short time ago, and it is only within the last fifty years that there has been much real progress toward the truth of it all. And this is the way it has been brought about. In our country the band of Wise Men at Washington, forming the United States Biological Survey, have for twenty years been gathering facts about the migration of birds. This body has sent out naturalists to travel through the North American continent from Guatemala to the Arctic Circle, to meet with other scientific men on their way, and keep careful notes of what they see, so that reports are had in the spring and fall each year from hundreds of observers.
“These reports give the date upon which each particular kind (or species, as they call it) of bird is seen, when it becomes plenty, and when it moves on again. The lighthouse keepers also give much information by noting the times at which they find the birds that are dashed to death against the lanterns in the tower. In short, the Wise Men have more material at hand than ever before from which to shape the story that day by day increases in wonder.