Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought That Birds Migrate to the Moon

A couple hundred feet down, a couple hundred thousand miles to go.

In the classic millennial film The Mighty Ducks, which was so awesome it convinced me and my frail pre-teen body to become a roller hockey goalie (to predictable ends), the team makes use of the iconic “Flying V” formation when in a pinch. The power of such a formation is of course proven in migrating birds, which can better cruise when in the upwash of the individuals ahead of them as they make their way to more hospitable climes in the winter.

Sure, now we know where they go, but our forebears really struggled with the problem of birds disappearing every winter. There were all kinds of theories, but none was more bizarre than that of English minister and scientist Charles Morton, who in the 17th century wrote a surprisingly well-reasoned, though obviously totally inaccurate, treatise claiming birds migrate to the moon and back every year.

That’s right. To the moon and back. And Morton was even aware of how epic this journey would be. He estimated the one-way trip to be 179,712 miles (he wasn’t so far off—the moon varies between 226,000 miles and 252,000 miles away, on account of its elliptical orbit), and reckoned it would take the birds 60 days to reach our satellite flying a dizzying 125 mph. Still, Morton reasoned, they pulled it off. And, really, because some species seem to disappear entirely, the only logical conclusion is that they set off into space. “Now, whither should these creatures go, unless it were to the moon?” he asked.

Whither should they go indeed.

Flock and Awe

Before we get to the particulars of Morton’s strange theory of migration, it’s worth noting the many other theories of antiquity, beginning with Aristotle, who reckoned that some birds hibernate while others simply transform into different species when winter comes around. Redstarts, for instance, morph into robins in winter—a fantastical claim that’s easier to understand when you consider that redstarts indeed migrate to Africa as robins make their way to Greece.

A pygmy battles his ruthless enemy, the crane, with nothing but a stick and a sombrero.

Later, the great Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of the pygmies, a race of tiny humans in Africa that do eternal battle with cranes (the birds, not the construction equipment). He notes “that in springtime their entire band, mounted on the backs of rams and she-goats and armed with arrows, goes in a body down to the sea and eats the cranes’ eggs and chickens, and that this outing occupies three months.” It’s an echo of Homer’s mention of cranes in the Iliad, birds that do indeed migrate from Europe to Africa: “shriek of cranes down from heaven / who flee the winter and the terrible rains / and fly off to the world’s end / bringing death and doom to the Pygmy-men / as they open fierce battle at dawn.”

Barnacle geese hatch from a tree.

Medieval bestiaries, sorts of zoological encyclopedias that every once in a while contained actual facts, often featured the barnacle goose, which supposedly grows on trees over water. It was a convenient explanation for geese simply turning up, seemingly out of nowhere, after their migration. Also convenient: Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat other than fish on Fridays, but because the barnacle goose isn’t born from an egg, wrote Gerald of Wales in 1187, “in some parts of Ireland, bishops and men of religion make no scruple of eating these birds on fasting days, as not being flesh, because they are not born of flesh.” (The same logic has variously been applied to beavers, whose tails apparently taste like fish, as well as the giant rodent capybara of South America, which spends so much time in marshes that some argued to the church that it should be classified as a fish.)

In the 16th century, the great cartographer and writer Olaus Magnus championed the theory that swallows disappear in the winter not because they travel to tropical climes to pick up coconuts, but because they bury themselves in the clay at the bottom of rivers. They come together in the fall in huge swarms, then sink down into the mud en masse, only to reemerge in the spring. But in his famous map the Carta Marina, Magnus also echoed the tale of the barnacle goose with an illustration of ducks being born from a tree.

Fly Me to the Moon

But back to Morton. According to Thomas P. Harrison in his essay “Birds in the Moon,” Morton quite rightly noted that migrating avians recognize “changes of the air where they are,” or notice the “alteration of abatement of their daily food,” and are therefore stirred to “obtain what is more suitable to them or to avoid what is offensive” and begin their migration. He refutes, however, the position of Olaus Magnus that birds make their way into the clay at the bottoms of rivers. There’s the rather glaring problem of the lack of air, he notes, not to mention frigid temperatures.

A woodcock passionately denying rumors that it migrates to the moon. Yes, this is what it looks like when birds passionately deny rumors.

Instead, because no one has seen where these birds go, they must be leaving Earth. Why else, then, would sailors report a woodcock flying in to land on their ship not from the horizon, but “right down from above”? It had to have been returning to our planet from space.

But how could they get back and forth between the celestial bodies? Luckily, in space the birds “encounter no air resistance and are unaffected by gravitation,” writes Harrison. “They are sustained by excess fat,” which turns out to be true in migrating birds, “and they sleep most of the journey of two months.” (Definitely not true, though migrating birds do indeed nod off for a few seconds at a time.)

Now, it’s important to note that it was a widely held belief in Morton’s time that all of the planets in our solar system must necessarily be inhabited, since a higher power wouldn’t take the trouble of creating planets and moons and have them just sit there all lonely-like. Even the discoverer of Uranus, William Herschel, went so far as to argue in 1795 that the sun held life as well. And even as late as the early 1900s, American astronomer Percival Lowell claimed he had discovered alien-built canals on Mars, which turned out to just be an optical illusion.

So Morton’s birds would find the moon quite well-appointed with vegetation and water. Indeed, according to Harrison, Morton’s inspiration for all of this likely came from John Wilkins, a founder of the famed Royal Society, who in 1638 published “The Discovery of a New World in the Moon.” In it, Wilkins argued “that the moon, with its borrowed light, is like our earth with its seas, streams, mountains, and so on,” writes Harrison. Wilkins goes on to suggest humans might get to the moon by attaching wings to our arms, or train birds to take us there.

The adventurous Domingo Gonsales and his flying machine made of swans.

Then along comes the author Francis Godwin, who just five months after Wilkins’ work publishes the tale of the adventurer Domingo Gonsales. Our hero trains 25 probably-somewhat-hesitant swans to ferry him around, but to his “unspeakable fear and amazement, [the birds] struck bolt upright” higher and higher and higher, until “the lines slacked; neither I nor the engine moved at all, but continued still, as having no manner of weight.”

They were on their way to the moon. And when they arrived Gonsales found trees three times as high and five times as thick as our own. But more importantly, there was wildlife, none of which compared to ours, “except swallows, nightingales, cuckows, woodcocks, batts, and some kind of wild fowl,” birds that “spend their time, in their absence from us, in that world.”

Such fiction became science in the 1600s, according to Harrison, and greatly influenced Morton’s theory of the moon migration. But in 1676, a man named Francis Willughby set us down the path to avian truth when he published Ornithologia, a masterwork of bird science we can file with such classics as John James Audubon’s Birds of America. While Willughby, like Morton, refuted Aristotle’s notion that swallows hibernate, he wasn’t under the impression that they instead went to the moon. More modestly, it was to the warmth of northern Africa.

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