The Somerset press. [volume] (Somerset, Ohio) 1873-1977, 1880-11-11
THE MIGRATION OF BIRDS.
Remarkable swifsness OF Birds ON the
Wing.


Familiar as the migration of birds is to
us, there is perhaps no question in zool-
ogy more obscure. The long flights
they take and the unerring certainty
with which they wing their way between
the most distant places, arriving and de-
parting in the same period, year after
year, are points in the history of birds
of passage as mysterious as they are in
teresting. We know that most migrants
fly after sundown, though many of them
select moonlight night to cross the
Mediterranean. But that their meteor
illogical instinct is not unerring is yet
proved by the fact that thousands are
every year drowned in their flight over
the Atlantic and other oceans. North
ern Africa and Western Asia are selected
as winter quarters by most of them, and
they may be often noticed on their way
thither to hang over towns at night, puZ-
zled, in spite of their experience, by the
shifting lights of the streets and houses.
The swallow OR the nightingale may
sometimes be delayed by unexpected cir
cumstances. Yet it is rarely that they
arrive or depart many days sooner or
later, one year with another Professor
Newton considered that were seafowl
satellites revolving round the earth their
arrival could hardly be more surely cal.
culated by an astronomer. Foul weather
or fair, heat or cold, the puffins repair to
some of their stations punctually on a
given day, as if their movements were
regulated by clock-work. The swiftness
of flight which characterizes most birds
enables them to cover vast space in a
brief time. The common black swift
can fly two hundred and seventy-six
miles an hour, speed which, if it could
be maintained for less than half day,
would carry the bird from its winter to
its summer quarters. The large purple
swift, of America, is capable of even
greater feats on the wing. The chimney
| swallow is slower ninety miles per hour
being about the limit of its powers; but
the passenger pigeon, of the United
States, can accomplish a journey of one
thousand miles between sunrise and sun
set It is also true, as the ingenious
Herr Palmer has attempted to show,
that migrants during their long flight
may be directed by an experience partly
inherited and partly acquired by the in.
dividual bird. They often follow the
coast lines of continents, and invariably
take, on their passage over the Mediter-
ranean, one of the three routes. But
this theory will not explain how they
pilot themselves across broad oceans, and
is invalidated by the fact, familiar te
every ornithologist, that the old and
young birds do not journey in company
Invariably the young broods travel to
gether; then come, after an interval
the parents; and finally the rear is
brought up by the weakly y, ..infrm, molt
ing, and broken-winged. This is the
rule in autumn. The return journey is
accomplished in the reverse order The
distance travelled seems, moreover, to
have no relation to the size of the trav
eler The Swedish blue throat performs
its maternal functions among the Laps
and enjoys its winter holiday among the
negroes of the Soudan, while the tidy
ruby-throated humming-bird proceed.
annually from Mexico to Newfoundland
and back again, though one would i'm
agine that so delicate little fairy would
be more at home among the cacti anc
agaves of the Tierra Caliente than among
the frs and fogs of the North.