MIGRATION OF BIRDS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1759, 1 December 1917, Page 4

MIGRATION OF BIRDS.

It seems possible and I’easonable that the birds attain to their destination along the trackless air-ways by flying from one conspicuous landmark to another, and find their way back by a similar method. There may be a possibility of this on land, but how are ive to account of those birds who find their way across the constantly moving seas? A startling piece of evidence, militating strongly against this theory, was recorded by the captain of an Atlantic liner. His ship was groping her way slowly through a thick fog, strictest lookout was kept, syren continually shrilling its warning of danger. Presently there came shooting through the mist a flock of gulls, whose breeding-ground was a small rocky islet miles off in that dense fog. With neither sight nor sound to guide, yet a something was sending them unerringly to their distant goal. But this passing observation has been scientifically tested under unique conditions by an expedition to the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands well out in the Gulf of Mexico. These islands are the breedinggrounds of noddy and sooty terns. The birds are confined to the tropics, and pass their lives within a very narrow zone; they winter along the shores of the Carribean Sea, and about the last week in April fly north to Bird Key, from which they are never found more than twenty miles distant. Hence, taken further than that, they are in a land and amid surroundings utterly new to them, and, therefore, absolutely unknown. They were taken 850 miles by steamer to Galveston, two batches being released on the way. Ten wei’e released when 585 miles out, and eight returned; two more released at night in a driving rain flew safely home across 720 miles of sea; and three out of the remaining twelve did the whole 850-milc ocean journey.

Migration is a fiddle which still awaits its solution. That greathosts of birds leave their feedinggrounds for breeding-grounds know, but as to how they .guide themselves we are in complete ignorance, and, not being under scientific coixxpulsion, we have no need to bemuse the layman by an affectation of knowledge built up by the glib use of lengthy technical terms, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”