Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The advent of spring is marked by the northward progression of the
isotherm of 42.8° F., which is the initial temperature required to
awaken the dormant reproductive and germinating activities in animals
and plants. With the gradual invasion of the United States, from the
south northward, by temperatures above this, there passes over the
different regions the ever-old but ever-new panorama of the spring
with its opening blossoms, its unfolding green, and its waves of
migrating birds. The restlessness produced by the periodic development
of the reproductive function under the stimulus of increased
temperature causes the highly organized bird life to spread out from
its winter quarters, wherever those may be, and follow the zone of new
green that steadily widens northward with its increase of food supply
in the form of myriads of insects. The comparative regularity in the
recurrence of this phenomenon year after year is attested by the
observations just noted. Each species has a certain, definite
physiological relation to temperature, and its migratory movement
toward the breeding ground is determined by the movement of the
isotherm of this temperature. Just as warm a spell of weather may
occur in early April as in the first week of May, but it does not
represent the permanent summer rise; and the majority of the warblers,
the catbird, the tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the two species
of oriole, the vireos, and the kingbird, are rarely if ever seen in
abundance in the Delaware Valley before the 1st of May. The migratory
movement of such species is as regular as any other periodic
phenomenon in Nature.
It is hard to realize the enormous multitude of birds that form a
so-called "wave." During the whole period of migration there is a
general northward movement of all the migratory species, but under the
influence of warm spells of weather this more or less uniform movement
rises into a vast wavelike sweep of birds. These bird waves, as
already noted, _follow_ the rise of temperature appearing at any given
locality about a day or two after the first day of the warm spell.
Many species of land birds migrate at night--such, for example, as the
orioles, tanagers, warblers, vireos, wrens, the majority of the
finches, the woodpeckers, and the thrushes, excepting the robin.
During the passing of one of the May waves the darkness overhead is
alive with flying birds. One may stand for hours at a time and hear
the incessant chirping and twittering of hundreds of birds calling to
one another through the night as though to keep from getting
separated. The great mass of individuals are probably guided by these
call notes.
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