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Comment by joecot | Hacker News Reader

Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations). Columbus turned out to be right that there was land there, he was just wrong about what the land was.

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> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere.

Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.

> seems pointless

I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.

Every year or two, people decide to fly from North America to Europe in a short range Cessna. They get the extra fuel tankage package, then hop from PEI to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, then Iceland to.... Svalbard, or maybe somewhere in the Scotish Isles. From there it's pretty standard flight operations over local bodies of water. If a Cessna can do it, that's well within a bird's migratory travel distance.

Yeah but you think they'd save fuel and locally source the twigs

Possibly not if the goal is to impress a potential mate.

Have you just invented this or is that actually some well-known fact that birds impress potential mates this way?

The joke is that the Cessna fliers are doing it to collect the twigs.

If you edit out 'birds', it'd be pure comedy.

I was under the impression that was still the standard way to move GA aircraft across the Atlantic, and happened regularly.

That’s a walk in the park

https://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/news/migration-marathons-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern#Distribution_and...

A bit different, but IIRC some seeds spread by passing through birds' digestive tract—which sidesteps the bird's decisions on the luggage. However, I'd guess the distance travelled is much shorter in this case.

It doesn't matter whether the birds did or didn't. What matters is that people of the time thought birds were bringing in sticks from somewhere west. People believed there was a land out there. Whether or not the observations behind those beliefs are credible doesn't take away from the fact of their believing there was a land to find.

It doesn’t matter, but it’s interesting.

If birds do do that, it's a strong indication that people may have actually believed it happened, rather than the believe being just a myth.

I mean, the real question is whether they carried any coconuts.

That, and if they were African or European.

Trick question… they were American

Fully laden you say?

Barnacle goose do migrate from Greenland to the British isles, but I do not know if Greenland is considered north America.

Yes, Greenland is geographically in North America.

Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which it involuntarily carried with it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch

But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.

"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."

Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds actually transformed, but zoologist of that time at most believed, that they hibernated underwater", which seems a more solid theory, than transforming.

Transforming isn't exactly unknown; all insects do it.

Yes, but by the 18.th century, we knew that birds and mammals are a bit more complex than insects and quite shape stable.

Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects.

And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe directly; they often happen e.g. underground.

"Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects."

Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different. Cells were known already. And that insects transform is known, but birds were closely known and there was not observation of them changing drastically. So that Aristoteles had this thinking is understandable given the time, but after enlightenment, I would not expect that from the early scientists.

> Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different.

This is not a valid concept. Vertebrates develop from stem cells the same way insects do.

> Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds...

Makes me think of loons, which completely change their plumage for the winter in addition to migrating from fresh water lakes to oceanic waters. Without close study, you might not realize they're the same birds.

You have it wrong. It was carrying a coconut.

Another piece of land to the west before the Americas is the Azores archipelago roughly half way between Europe and Newfoundlannd. Maybe the bird came from there. This was known to Europeans well before Colombus trip.

They could have been coming from Ireland too..

One of the only species of birds known to be capable of transatlantic flight, and also credibly thought to regularly making the crossing [0] is the magnificent frigate bird [1]. The bird has a super interesting capability of flying on a single half of the brain. Remarkably similar to single slower core operation of a computer... [2]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_the_m...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_frigatebird

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.008...

From Wikipedia: “Frigatebirds (…) sometimes indulge in kleptoparasitism, harassing other birds to force them to regurgitate their food”

I knew birds could regurgitate food (to feed their young) but this is something else…

Isn't the land west of England just...Ireland?

Wales?

Given they are talking about sailing-off, I'd venture they mean the island west of the isle-on-which-England-resides.

Oh I see. Yes, so... Anglesey? :D

Again, Columbus was not a very clever man.

Let's first see you wangle tens or hundreds of millions in today's money from the Spanish Crown, then you can say that.

> Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere

The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born, so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was closer.

Ireland is an island lying less than 100 miles west of England.

so the older civilizations like greeks or romans did not know about the americas? We've come a long way in 500 hundred years!

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