Pfeilstorch | Hacker News Reader

Pfeilstorch

en.wikipedia.org

211 pointsgeorgecmu53 comments

A modern spin on this:

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-44645217

> which it will have to pay

What, why? It's fraud, why would they pay?

If I steal your phone or SIM and make a bunch of calls with it, then would the phone company waive the bill if you tell them "this arp242 guy stole my phone"? That's not the phone company's problem. They should have cancelled the SIM card.

Radio Poland could, in principle, try to get a reimbursement from that Sudanese person, but good lucking 1) finding them, and 2) actually doing something about it.

The problem is phone companies not implementing usage limit policies.

No one should be exposed to unlimited liability.

Maybe they do but the user has to enable it and set a limit. At least I have this, and maybe the NGO had the option too but didn't think about it. We don't know.

Imagine being a dude in Africa. You work so hard making your arrows nice and straight.

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.

And then the bloody bird flies away with your arrow.

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

> Must take unreal determination to fly that far with a near-mortal injury and a literal weight around your neck

And imagine the irony of then being shot by a hunter after you make it to your destination. But hey, at least it became one of the most famous storks in history...

The stork's last thought being "again???"

I was imagining the bird fighting back with your own spear...

But truly, the thing that sticks out to me is that the spear is rather balanced in the bird's neck. I imagine that if it had pierced a bit less, or a bit more, it could have thrown off the bird's center of gravity too much to achieve stable flight.

This is exactly classic survivorship bias, right? It's the kind of thing that usually works for the hunter (or they'd have learned not to do it), and the bird surviving to be observed far away is a combination of rare circumstances...

It makes you think of what must have happened to all the others. Must have been thousands / millions of bird-spear interactions per Pfeilstorch.

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.

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.

My mother used to throw stones at sparrows, sprint up to them as they were dazed, twist their necks, pull out their feathers, and then roast them for a light snack. She relishes telling this story every time she sees a small bird resting nearby. Her one saving grace in my mind is, "hey at least she ate it."

Not really any different than eating chicken. At least the sparrow got to live a nice life in the meantime.

People usually don’t get aroused by the thought of killing animals though.

Which is idiotic imo, since swiftly murdering a pigeon is much better than eating a chicken that has been through a lifetime of suffering, which is the majority of chickens in post industrial societies.

My grandpa would climb trees to raid bird nests for their eggs. I'm not sure which is worse to modern sensibilities -- that he was predating on song birds like a neighborhood cat, or that he ate the eggs raw.

Is eating raw eggs controversial?

Health-wise perhaps, but it's not uncommon to have a raw egg on a tartare steak for example.

Sure, mix 'em into stuff and you've got a proper recipe. But just raw egg all on its own?

I believe the story but I’m having trouble understanding how that would be worth the effort unless you were truly starving (which it seems like she wasn’t, since she called it a “light snack”) - what is there, a half ounce of meat on a sparrow?

I imagine the thrill of the hunt would make it worth it, not to mention a story you can tell every time you see a small bird hanging around.

"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"

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.

" 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"

Which had its roots in a rumor " that fishermen in northern waters sometimes hauled in mixed catches of fish and hibernating swallows"

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.

Wait til you find out where people thought barnacle geese came from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth

The German Wikipedia article (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch) 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): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918399

It's truly amazing. You'll never know what you'll learn on HN on any given day.

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.

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...

In the 19th century, Europe was a bit further ahead than wooden arrows with flint tips.

It definitely did prove that it came from far away.

>Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater

Sentences like these remind you that science is a recent invention.

Is it really unscientific to consider the possibility that birds turn into mice when we see eggs turn into chickens and caterpillars turn into butterflies all the time?

No, but it is unscientific to assert such a theory without evidence.

Asserting and considering are not the same thing.

How sure are you that you don’t hold beliefs that will seem ridiculous to people in 300 years?

Science is all about forming hypotheses and testing them.

Warning: if you're sensitive seeing injured animals. Link has an image of taxidermy of one. (Though I suppose all taxidermy is injured animals one way or another...)

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