This episode of the American Birding Podcast is sponsored by our friends at Biodo Books.

Remember that ABA members get a discount on all orders from Biodo Books.

You can check them out at BiodoBooks.com.

Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.

I'm Nate Swick.

Have you heard about the feel-storch?

They got a little bit of notoriety when the topic was featured by the Twitter account, Depths of Wikipedia. But the feel storch

occupy a very important place in the history of bird science, particularly as humans began to learn

about bird migration. I should explain what a feel storch is.

This is a German word meaning aerostork,

and it is a white stork that was injured while wintering in sub-Saharan Africa

and returned in the spring to Europe with the projectile

that it was injured by, stuck somewhere in its body.

There are about 25 of these birds that have been documented, the most famous of which

was a white stork with a 30-inch spear from Central Africa embedded in its neck that was found

in 1822 near Rostock, Germany. It is now in the collection of the University of Rostock.

Until relatively recently in human history, people didn't really understand bird migration,

and they struggled to explain why certain species just disappeared in the spring and fall.

As you might expect, humans being an imaginative species, they came up with all sorts of wild explanations

for these disappearances, including the belief

that birds flew to the moon,

or that birds hibernated in the mud at the bottom

...