Bird Migration

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2017

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why some birds migrate and others do not, how they select their destinations and how they navigate the great distances, often over oceans. For millennia, humans set their calendars to birds' annual arrivals, and speculated about what happened when they departed, perhaps moving deep under water, or turning into fish or shellfish, or hibernating while clinging to trees upside down. Ideas about migration developed in C19th when, in Germany, a stork was noticed with an African spear in its neck, indicating where it had been over the winter and how far it had flown. Today there are many ideas about how birds use their senses of sight and smell, and magnetic fields, to find their way, and about why and how birds choose their destinations and many questions. Why do some scatter and some flock together, how much is instinctive and how much is learned, and how far do the benefits the migrating birds gain outweigh the risks they face? With Barbara Helm Reader at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine at the University of Glasgow Tim Guilford Professor of Animal Behaviour and Tutorial Fellow of Zoology at Merton College, Oxford and Richard Holland Senior Lecturer in Animal Cognition at Bangor University Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:45.2	Hello for millennia bird migration was a complete mystery to humans today while what we know is
0:50.6	remarkable much of that mystery remains.
0:53.7	There was an idea in ancient Greece that birds turned into fishes when they were not around.
0:58.4	In later folk laws, some were thought to turn into barnacles, others to hibernating cliffs or at the bottom of lakes.
1:05.0	And perhaps those ideas are less extraordinary than what we now know.
1:08.2	For example, that birds weighing less than a cup of water can fly across oceans non-stop from New Zealand to Alaska, breed and return.
1:17.0	Howbirds know where they are going is not yet fully understood, but may include some combination of internal
1:22.3	clocks, of ways of detecting magnetic fields and
1:24.8	of heightened sense of smell.
	...

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