THE TIMETABLE OF THE BIRDS.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16096, 20 September 1924, Page 14 (Supplement)

THE TIMETABLE OF THE BIRDS.

Millions of years before man trod the earth the birds were winging their way over land and sea, flying north or south as the sunshine beckoned them, or the winter threatened them.

They kept to the same unseen tracks in the air; they came and went each year at the same time; they taught their young to follow them; and so the knowledge passed down for millions of generations of birds became an instinct with them, fixed unalterably in their bird minds.

Every year something whispers to the bird, "It's time for us to go," and away he flies. All his friends are doing likewise. To each of them the Pied Piper of the birds, all unseen, is whispering his secret call. Migrant birds imprisoned in an aviary hear it, and will fly despairingly round and round the wires in a desperate effort to be free.

It is not the only instinctive call they hear. Of all living things the birds are the most persistent timekeepers. They have, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a time for every purpose under the sun. Their times for going or coming on their journeys from north to south or east to west, from Africa to Europe, or from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic, are fixed and vary only within a few days each year.

But also they have times for mating, and building, and teaching their young. They have times for singing and for silence. They have times for play and times for work. It might almost be said of them, though they are such a gentle tribe, that they have a time for peace and a time for war. What is most astonishing about them is not that they have times and seasons, for all living things are more or less like them in that respect, but that they keep their times with suoh clock-like accuracy. If their timetables go wrong suoh odd results follow that naturalists have been puzzled by them.