Staggered Holidays Practised By Birds For Countless Years

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 59, 2 March 1949, Page 2

Staggered Holidays Practised By Birds For Countless Years

People in Britain have only recently begun to “stagger” holidays and journeys to' and from work., But the birds have been “staggering” . their comings and goings for countless thousands of years. These migrations have mysterious features, and observers learn new things about them every year. Some of the birds have no choice; there is neither food nor warmth enough to keep them alive during the winter. There are also birds like the lapwing, of which hosts remain during the winter. Those that remain may be caught by deadly winter conditions like those of early 1947; those that go risk an experience like that of a swarm of lapwings—leg-rings showed to have come from Cumberland—which twenty years ago alighted in Newfoundland alive, after having been blown across the Atlantic. With pinching winter want at home, or frosty gales that may prevent them from finishing their journeys, birds have grave risks to face. If conditions did not average out to their advantage, however, Nature would long since have modified the scheme. Migration leads to astonishing examples of co-operation and contrivance. Great aircraft carriers are a modern device; birds have for ages untold had their carriers. On migration the gold-crest the tiniest bird, makes larger birds, like owls, his carriers, mounting and clinging to them while the miles are winged away.