A modern spin on this:<p>SIM card from stork tracking device have been removed somewhere in Sudan and someone ended up using it in their own phone racking up a huge bill for the environmental group.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-44645217" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-44645217</a>
Imagine being a dude in Africa. You work <i>so</i> hard making your arrows nice and straight.<p>Eventually you end up with maybe 5-10 in your quiver. You patiently crawl up to some birds, take aim, and BAM - perfect shot right through the throat.<p>And then the bloody bird flies away <i>with</i> your arrow.<p>Edit: I also want to add - poor bird. Must take unreal determination to fly that far with a near-mortal injury and a literal weight around your neck
One of the docks I work on is frequented by a pigeon with a blowdart embedded in its neck. I have tried to catch it a few times, but I am not sure that removing it would not harm the pigeon even worse.<p>One day I ran across two young men on the dock carrying blowguns. I remarked that I was wondering how the pigeon ended up with a blowdart in its neck. They claimed that neither of them were the ones who shot the pigeon, so it is apparently still a mystery which local asshole is putting darts in pigeons.
"This Pfeilstorch was crucial in understanding the migration of European birds. Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time"<p>That sounds both funny and bad, but it seems that those zoologists did not actually believed the weird shape shifting stuff, but rather the more reasonable theory, that they hibernate under water.<p>" This misinformation lasted all the way into the late 1800s, when American ornithologist Dr. Elliott Coues listed the titles of 182 papers dealing with the hibernation of swallows"<p>Which had its roots in a rumor " that fishermen in northern waters sometimes hauled in mixed catches of fish and hibernating swallows"<p>So it is not that ridiculous, since they did not know yet, that birds cannot breath underwater, but they knew that birds could dive very long and deep. And fish do hibernate and running water is still way warmer, than frozen ground.
The German Wikipedia article (<a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch</a>) has some more interesting details: there were 25 documented sightings, but the one from Rostock was the only known taxidermically prepared example - until in 2006, someone rediscovered a forgotten second one in the attic of the Kirchliches Forschungsheim in Wittenberg - however, this stork was found in 1935, so I imagine it didn't contribute as much to the understanding of bird migration as the one found more than 100 years earlier.
2 years ago (20 comments): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918399" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918399</a>
It's truly amazing. You'll never know what you'll learn on HN on any given day.<p>For that I love it and thank you. It explains why it is so damn addictive.
It still requires knowledge that this arrow is African.<p>If you have enough knowledge transfer to know that this particular arrow is African z you would imagine that you also would know that storks show up in Africa only in the wintertime...
>Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater<p>Sentences like these remind you that science is a recent invention.
Warning: if you're sensitive seeing injured animals. Link has an image of taxidermy of one. (Though I suppose <i>all</i> taxidermy is injured animals one way or another...)