If you asked a European person in the 1700s, where do birds go in the winter?

They might just look at you with a blank stare, then shake their head and walk away.

Or feeling more helpful, they might refer you to a pamphlet published in 1703,

succinctly titled,

An essay toward the probable solution of this question,

Whence come the stork and the turtle dove, the crane,

and the swallow when they know and observe the appointed time of their coming? Yes, that's the title.

The answer given in the pamphlet? Birds fly to the moon in the winter. Silly, right? Well, sure,

but before scientists had actually studied birds and the moon more

carefully, this would have been about as reasonable as any other answer. Another explanation in

ye olden days was that birds hibernate at the bottom of the sea or while buried in swamp mud.

But in 1822, a hunter in Germany shot and killed a white stork and found that the

bird already had a large arrow lodged in its neck. And it turned out that the arrow came from

Central Africa. This lucky, not-so-lucky stork gave the world its first good piece of evidence

that birds in the northern hemisphere often

undertake long journeys south in the winter. This bird was dubbed a phytelstork, which means

aerostork in German. I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that very well, phytostork. Amazingly, this

bird was not one of a kind. About 25 of these phytostorks have turned up since 1822.

Those are some pretty hardcore birds to survive getting impaled with an arrow and then flying

thousands of miles north with the arrow stuck in your body? Crazy.

These days, we don't need to puncture birds with arrows to understand their annual movements.

Thankfully, we now have amazing tools like GPS trackers that provide precise location info

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