Thursday, February 19, 2004

Winged migration

I'm having trouble with arctic terns.


I've been watching winged migration. I understand bird migrations.... kind of. You winter where it's warm. Then you fly north, for some reason, to breed. Then you fly back down south to get warm again for the winter.



Why not just stay where it's warm? Predators? Food? I don't know.



Birds fly thousands of miles. Really energetic ones fly six or seven thousand miles. But the arctic tern? It migrates twelve thousand miles. Twelve thousand miles!



The circumference of the earth is twenty-five thousand miles. That means pole-to-pole, it's twelve and a half thousand miles.



The arctic tern. It summers in the Arctic, then flies to the Antarctic for the winter?



I don't get it.