Wunderkammer Nr. 5

So here is a fun little bit of strangeness, since I am much too busy right now to write a really thoughtful article (just finished the piece for 8th BB and am now starting two new string quartets). Many years ago (and up into the 19th century) people considered the "disappearance" of migratory birds in the winter to be somewhat of an unexplainable anomaly. Aristotle himself theorized that birds went into hibernation at the bottom of the sea, while another gentleman cited merely as "a person of learning and piety" theorized that birds flocked to the moon for the winter in a pamphlet entitled "An Essay toward the Probable Solution of this Question: Whence come the Stork and the Turtledove, the Crane, and the Swallow, when they Know and Observe the Appointed Time of their Coming" published in 1703. Amazingly enough, the possibility of birds migrating to warmer climates became a possible reality to the scientific public when this unfortunate stork was bagged on the Bothmer Estate in Meklenburg on a clear May morning in 1822:



Yes, you have guessed correctly if your first assumption was that the arrow through the dear bird's neck is in fact a central African spear which impaled its feathery victim before the stork took off and flew the entire migratory route back to Mecklenburg. This was one of the first documented clues in the modern era to lead people to conclude that birds in fact migrate great distances across the Earth, rather than go to the moon or merely vanish until Spring. I have to say, it is no less wondrous to me that this stork actually made it all that way with the spear through its neck. This phenomenon is actually not peculiar to the bird pictured above, but has occurred upwards of 25 times since 1822 coining the term "Pfeilstorch" or "Arrow-stork". The bird pictured above is supposedly now housed at the University of Rostock in Mecklenburg.