Pfeilstorch | Hacker News Reader

Pfeilstorch

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324 pointsgyomu86 comments

I saw a Canada goose with an arrow through its neck frequenting the retention pond near a community college where I worked. The arrow was almost parallel to the ground in orientation. I called a local wildlife rescue but never heard if they trapped the bird. Hopefully they did and were able to remove the arrow. I was surprised how well the bird was getting around.

> I was surprised how well the bird was getting around.

SurvivorBias.png except it's a silhouette of a goose with numerous red arrows drawn over it.

So King Arthur knowing that swallows fly south for the winter in Monty Python And The Holy Grail was anachronistic?

The only historical mistake in that movie, for sure.

That depends. African or European?

Plot twist: sometimes both.

Crazy stuff: "white storks that are injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and return to Europe with the projectile stuck in their bodies", they apparently helped people in 1822 learn that birds migrate?! Was it not widely known before that? Cool!

Some people thought that the birds flew to the moon in the winter!

Well, how did they know that the spear didn't belong to the men in the moon then?

that’s crazy, I read it in a book but can’t recall which one. In the same book they were going through the eels mistery about where they go to breed, hopefully we gonna find an eel with a spear in the neck one day

It was likely widely believed before 1822 that birds migrate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926306

A little further down it said this:

> 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.

This is hilarious in hindsight... I wonder what kind of beliefs we hold that will seem equally funny to the people in 200 years. ;)

Just look at Youtube.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth

From our late scientific-era perspective it's really difficult to appreciate how badly intuitive understanding of cause and effect can let us down.

It wasn’t even accepted that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs until early 1990s

To be fair, that was a genuinely crazy idea until the detailed evidence came in. The question itself only comes up after lots of relatively modern science. Similar for plate tectonics.

Erm, the evidence for an event that happened 60+ mio years ago and the evidence for an event happening every year that you can watch in real time now is maybe not quite comparable?

Bird migrations aren't that easy to observe with 1822 tech either. It's not like they could stick a GPS recorder on a bird, or mark a bird and follow it in a car. You can make local observations (many birds fly overhead, heading South-East) but with how difficult travel was it's not trivial to piece that together to the conclusion that birds travel from Europe all the way to Africa

Or you could have talked to people who travel.

During the early age of scientific inquiry in Europe, very few human travelers were following the white stork's migration route (Europe→Anatolia→Levant→Nile→East Africa), and I'd guess that most of those who did were from the Muslim world and not particularly accessible to European observers.

The small number of long-distance travelers and cultural contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe did result in lots of valuable learning; this particular bit of learning just took a while.

and spontaneous generation before that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

It is possible that people knew that animals flew South for winter and just become unknowable. But then scholars tried to apply a new conceptual framework to that. Asking the question was a step forward, even if the hypothesised answer was wrong. Its basically quackary with good intentions. And I expect some people knew all along that birds flew South but lacked the words or the influence to wrap that in an abstract concept that would be taken seriously.

Maybe honkery?

Don't forget that first trains were invented just 50 years prior. A journey of even 100 kilometers was far.

E.g.: https://www.fastcompany.com/3024267/this-interactive-map-sho...

The idea that something can casually travel thousands of kilometers was beyond the realm of fantastical

But people did had eyes to see how easily birds can ride the winds along the sky. And ships also existed from where birds flying in formations over the sea could be seen.

edit: But it seems people did know since 3000 years, not all were trapped in superstition and ignorance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration

TBF this is at least as much a story of the etymology of a German compound word as it is about natural science.

This should become some kind of business jargon aphorism: "Focus groups are the arrow storks of user migration" or something like that.

Migration was a theory but really been proven.

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

What did people in Africa think? I mean, they also saw birds disappearing.

That "birds hibernated on the moon" is even stranger, unless you are into 18xx sci-fi.

When I read things like this, it gives me the following thought pattern:

1. I wonder what weird stuff people believe today that is absolutely bonkers..

then a few moments later...

2. Oh hang on, some people still think the earth is flat, nevermind.

There is nothing strange about this, people simply had a different understanding of the world. Your understanding of it would be the SciFi, because at the time people were not aware of space having a vacuum, or that the moon is already outside earths atmosphere.

They might have wondered about finding birds filled with bird shot (little rocks) or carrying a bullet (small pebble) but that's not obviously connected to human hunting activity for a society oblivious to firearms (unlike arrows and spears).

Everyone immediately thought about the famous story of returning damaged airplanes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#Military

And to think, we were reinforcing the wrong part of the stork for so long…

The interesting part is that before that people thought birds are changing form in winter or hibernate.

Reminds me of the theory that insects like flies spontaneously emerge from decaying matter and dung. I wonder what magical thoughts we're taking for granted today.

“We are building thinking machines”

The draft/promaja. In Eastern Europe people genuinely think that if you leave two windows open you'll get various diseases like cold/flu/headache/ear pain/etc.

I've tried to understand this belief. So if you stand outside and it's windy, that's perfectly fine. But if you're inside, and you open two windows, that's deadly, even if there's no draft to be felt. I think some people think it's even more deadly if you can't feel it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1csstle/draft_myth...

Sounds like the same energy as fan death in South Korea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

I don't know about colds and stuff, but I have a knee that's very sensitive and starts hurting from drafts (fans and AC blowing also triggers it, and cold and humidity makes it worse also, so it fluctuates quite a bit through the year). Being outside on a windy day doesn't have this effect.

Being cold weakens your immune system. Draft air increases heat loss. There is nothing complex to understand. Outside you would wear a scarf or other appropriate clothing to not feel cold.

That‘s one of the biggest health myths around. Cold weather does NOT weaken your immune system AT ALL (except if you‘re actually hypothermic, which is very different from just feeling uncomfortable). It’s the CONDITIONS that RESULT from cold weather that actually cause those infections to ramp up in winter (think more people staying inside in enclosed spaces).

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/scientists-finally-fi...

Thank you. The real myth is the idea that it's a myth cold weather doesn't cause colds.

Cold, drier air in contact with your mucus membranes lowers your defenses against viruses. It's that basic. In just regular cold air -- not hypothermia.

Thank you! It always was astounding to me how people could argue with so much vigor and conviction that something as complicated as the immune system could not possibly be affected by something as basic as temperature changes.

People get colds in the winter time because they are all packed inside (without proper ventilation (ha!)).

Now we have AC in trains and buses, so the windows are closed too. I'd expect a more even flu season.

I'm not a biologist / epidemiologist but maybe the mutation of flu strains are synched up with this annual human behavior such that by the end of the winter most everyone has developed immunity for the current strains. By the next winter the mutations have happened again and the cycle repeats.

I'd love for this random thought to be confirmed / corrected.

for that to be true, the flu would be have to be more than than a unicellular organism in order to know what seasons are. do you have a proposal for how that would work? I'm sure there's a Nobel prize for you ($1 million dollars!) if you have something.

Unicellular organisms can be quite intelligent. Just because it has a single cell doesn't mean it doesn't have a mind!

Now the flu is virus, but it could still have a mind to perceive the seasons in it's infected running state.

Oh yeah, I remember The Draft, killer of Man, slayer of the innocent and bane of humanity since the dawn of time. I have been suffering from migraine attacks since childhood, and every time I complained about headaches it was attributed to draft. I knew that I had not been hit by draft, but that did not matter. It even made me afraid of The Draft for a time until I noticed that draft had no negative effects on me. And it wasn't regular headache either because regular headache medication like Aspirin had no effect on me. It took until early adulthood to finally get diagnosed as having migraines. (for those who wonder how the diagnostic process works, you get a questionnaire and if you answer three out of five questions correctly the doctor is like "congratulations, you have migraine, here are your triptans")

Thinking back, there was a lot of other bullshit I was told as a child that adults believed, but that seemed wrong to me:

- Tongue map, the idea that certain tastes can only be felt on certain regions of the tongue, even got taught that one in school in 5th grade. I never experienced that sensation, it always felt like every region of my tongue can sense any taste. The teacher went as far having us apply different tasting substances to different regions to "experience and confirm" the lesson. I still could not feel it, which makes it really scary to think how indoctrination can override what one's own sense tell you. Either everyone else was just going along with the BS, or they successfully had gaslighted themselves into believing the lesson.

- The idea that people on Columbus's time thought the earth was flat. How could he ever have gotten enough funding and personnel for what would have been seen as a suicide mission?

- The Great Wall of China being visible from space. Sure, it's really long, but it's quite narrow. So why would this structure specifically be the only man-made structure visible from space? I guess it depends on one's definition of "space", but then it is not the only mman-made structure visible from "space", and as such nothing special in that regard.

There is probably more stuff that I can't think of right now.

Opening one window makes a house a closed end tube. Opening two makes it open ended and lowers static pressure that airflow must overcome significantly. Walking out tend to increase your metabolism so standing outside and inside are different. It doesn't sound so stupid to me especially considering it's a medieval rule of thumb.

In the Mediterranean, people think if you swim just after eating you’ll get a “digestion shock”, fall unconscious, and drown. You need to wait two hours after lunch.

I strongly suspect the rumor was started by parents wanting kids to leave them alone for a nap, but it’s extremely extended. Somehow showers don’t count.

Hey my German mom told me that as well. Are you saying that's not true? Brb - I have some googling to do

Nope. The shock is a medical possibility if you accidentally fall in Arctic water or something like that, but it’s not something that will come up in a swimming pool scenario unless you’re doing one of those influencer ice baths or something of the sort.

It’s mainly caused by extreme sudden temperature change, not much to do with the stomach.

Funnily enough, even medical pages in Spain will talk at length about the medical phenomenon without mentioning that little detail.

"Digestion shock"? I have heard similar advice but it was always just cramp.

Hard to translate. “Corte de digestion” (literally “digestion cut”) is how it’s called in Spanish.

That was also widely believed in the UK when I was a kid (60s/70s).

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

"Aristotle declared that summer Redstarts annually transform themselves into Robins in winter."

https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/2228

Yes, that's also what caught my attention. I landed on this article by way of reading about barnacles, and that the Barnacle Goose is named as such because it was thought it was born from barnacles.

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

Maybe it's hard for us to realize how filled with superstition the world used to be; and how so little was understood and in such minuscule proportions compared to today, such that most anything could appear plausible under the right circumstances.

The false hypotheses of the past become the superstitions of the future. I can see how "birds hatch from barnacles" and "birds travel thousands of kilometers twice a year" mightve once sounded equally plausible, especially given that you can't exactly follow a migrating bird very far.

How many false hypotheses today will seem like equally ridiculous superstitions to people in the future? I'm sure we can all think of a few popular beliefs that already fail under modest scrutiny.

On the contrary, you'd be surprised to learn how filled the world with superstition still is today.

Used to be? People are always superstitious about things they don't understand. See the global economy and LLMs, for example.

The article doesn't actually say that, it's just phrased badly. A Pfeilstorch just provided pretty conclusive evidence for migration between Africa and Europe.

But the theory that birds were migrating to somewhere else is likely older. It's even plausible that bird migration was the mainstream theory/assumption, not the hibernation theory.

Indeed, Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase "migratory birds" was already in use before the 18th century, so before the first known Pfeilstorch in 1822:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=migratory+bird...

The current German term for a migratory bird, "Zugvogel", apparently became common around 1750: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Zugvogel%2CZug...

Apparently only swallows were suspected to hibernate, and even in ancient Greece, people knew about bird migration. The swallow hibernation theory was described as disproved before the 18th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration#Historical_view...

IIRC there is an example in the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford, UK. The museum is packed full of amazing artefacts borrowed (ahem) from around the world and is well worth a visit:

https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

That's a lot of extra drag for the poor stork, besides the pain of having an arrow in its neck

The arrow must have been a drag. "I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the neck."

Wondering what the bird must have been thinking.

I am injured, this is not great?

oof ouch my neck

> The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It was carrying a 75-centimetre (30 in) spear from central Africa in its neck.[2][3] The specimen was subsequently stuffed and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock.

So, where Africans tried and failed, Germans succeeded.

Something funny about the first Pfeilstorch being found near Klutz. Sounds Monty Python-ish.

I thought of the discworld.

https://wiki.lspace.org/Klotz

I think the german names of Überwald are not just german sounding, but the author really meant it: A Klotz is a brick or block.

I haven't read Carpe Jugulum for years, but the slow/dim/clumsy meaning of Klotz has been adopted into (American) English as "klutz".

Does this hurt the bird?

I expect it feels the same way about having an arrow through its throat as you would.

"The africans learned to aim for the body and the Pfeilstorch went extinct"

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