Hello, it's your host, Andrew here.

If you're enjoying Send Me to Sleep so far, and you'd like to help support the show,

the best way to do that is Send Me to Sleep Premium.

Over there, you'll get ad-free episodes, as well as access to all of our bonus episodes.

You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes.

Thanks so much for listening, and here's just a few ads before the show begins.

Something I find quite funny is that Aristotle in, well, somewhere around 350 BCE, first popularized the idea that birds hibernated during the winter.

He'd recognised that they were disappearing for large periods of the year,

going someplace else.

And his idea was that they would hibernate,

perhaps even bury themselves underground.

And although his relative contemporaries at the time,

such as Pliny the Elder,

only a few hundred years later, has writings of observations

of birds migrating, as we know them to do now. This idea of Aristotle's stuck around for some time, almost until the beginning of the 20th century, you can still find academic papers written on the subject of the hibernation of birds during winter.

And in a way, I sort of don't blame people for coming to that conclusion. And, of course, first of all, because many other animals in this world do hibernate.

It's quite a common thing, phenomenon, to witness within other animals, but also to have people believe that birds were capable of

travelling such vast distances not only as an act of endurance and a feat of strength, but also as a feat of navigation.

And for purposes that were wildly unclear at the time and to some degree still are to us in this present day,

well it is a bit of a stretch. It sort of feels a little bit more intuitive, like it makes more sense that a bird might just disappear because it's hiding away somewhere.

It might be resting.

And in that way

...