A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found | Hacker News Reader

A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found

nationalgeographic.com

78 pointsbryanrasmussen34 comments

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https://archive.is/V29Pq

I can't get past the captcha

You're using Cloudflare DNS, so archive.is refuses you. If you switch to a DNS server that forwards ECS it will work.

Resume: A type of small kestrel migrates each year to some place in Africa, nobody knew where, until now.

The article seems to be free for me (with adblock?). Also, the link does not work.

I have uBlock installed, and I got an overlay wanting me to enter my email address to read the article.

Works fine for me in Firefox with uBlock.

The site has a client-side registration wall loaded by JavaScript to obscure the full text that is already loaded in your browser.

If scripts are turned off in your browser or if you press a reader mode button, those kinds of registration walls won't load.

The falcons were found congregating on an obscure German forum from the early 2000's.

Man what a beautiful bit if knowledge, reminds me a bit of the eel mystery. Thanks to the researchers doing this sort of work, and I hope their conservation efforts go well

What’s the eel mystery?

To do your question justice would take a while but its quite an interesting story to google. The gist: We did not have confirmation of where NA/EU freshwater eels laid their eggs until 2022. No one has ever seen them reproduce. This mystery is also old: Aristotle wrote about it. They have been an enigma for a long period of human history despite being an important part of it!

Also, before he got famous for inventing diagnosing everyone with penis envy, Freud spent a summer trying and failing to find the eels' reproductive organs.

Reading the article, makes me think that mined areas are good for conservation. When the Angolan area where they congregate is demined their numbers might start declining.

What kind of frequencies do these falcon trackers use? Any datasheets available?

Let us build FalconNogs (like Satnogs) with SDRs!

They weren't "missing": GPS-tagged red-footed falcons revealed that they migrate to a tiny communal roost in central Angola (“Falcopolis”) each February–March.

There, saved you a click (disappointed on National Geographic for that clickbaity headline).

They were missing. Then they used GPS tags to locate them.

That’s why the article is titled “ A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found”.

Something was unknown, then we used sensors to solve the mystery. Wild, isn’t it?

According to the dictionary definition of "missing", they were not missing.

At best, our assumptions about where we expected to find them were wrong.

So my keys have never truly been missing, eh?

So everyone else's keys are missing materially all of the time?

You have a valid reason to expect that your keys are in the place you remember leaving them.

That’s not the case with large flocks of living animals. In that case, you’re simply making a category error in imagining that those living animals behave much like your keys.

What dictionary are you using?

I just looked it up and MW’s definition of “missing” is “absent” or “lost” or “needed or expected but not included”. Dictionary.com says “absent, not found, or lost” and “lacking”. Wiktionary says “Not able to be located; gone, misplaced”, “Not present when it (they) should be”, and “Of an internal combustion engine: running roughly due to an occasional lack of a spark or other irregular fault.”

Why do you think any of those definitions fit the case of the falcons?

I took a look at “MW’s” web definition and it seems singularly lacking. Perhaps you should consider purchasing a real dictionary.

Cambridge is a bit better: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/missi...

A common theme is that for something to be “missing,” it should not be where you expect it to be. But if your expectation is invalid, then it’s not “missing,” you simply have wrong expectations, which is the case with these falcons.

For example, I could say that there are a million falcons missing from my front yard right now. Do you think that’s a valid way to describe it?

I wish I could put gps tags on things after they go missing...

Well you can if those things first come back for a time

Thank you for summarizing! TIL about the Falcopolis in Angola.

> disappointed on National Geographic for that clickbaity headline

I don't think there's a single name brand from "before internet" that has survived without turning into a clickbait chaser of ad revenue above all else.

The term for this is "late stage capitalism".

Is this actually clickbait? The title is in the form of many clickbait title, but I'd argue it delivers; the article is more interesting than the title.

I suggest readers spend the click and the five minutes.

It's written by Ed Yong, who is a national treasure.

Hell yes, you should read it.

Is this what all those Flock cameras are for?

Flock cameras are for surveilling normal citizen and is used for suppressing freedom, quelling protests and to fulfill capitalist wildest dream to make America like China not for flocks of falcons.

It appeared to be a question about Flock cameras. It really was a double entendre where Flock could be taken to mean a flock of birds. Normally, explaining a joke removes all the humor.

Do falcons have no right to privacy?

But what do they have to hide?

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