The Heavy Toll of Bird Migrations
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A migration that takes a toll of millions of lives takes place every year between North and South America.
Dr. Alexander Wetmore of the Smithsonian has had the experience of standing on a lonely beach on the coast of Venezuela and actually watching North American birds arrive at the end of their gruelling journey, exhausted and emaciated. Every day over his camp on the shore passed familiar birds from home—sandpipers, yellowlegs, bobolinks, barn swallows and warblers.
“There was brought to me more definitely than ever before,” Dr. Wetmore reported, “the tremendous loss of life that this journey entails. The wastage of modern human battlefields, though terrific beyond words, is nothing in comparison. On this open shore small feathered migrants often made a landfall in a state of evident exhaustion. In the early morning I found little groups of them feeding on the short herbage. Some obviously had barely made a landfall after an exhausting sea journey. In some of those that I handled the flight muscles that move the wings were reduced to thin bands through which the angular ridges of the breast bones protruded. It was easy to visualize the hundreds of thousands that had wandered over the water until they fell to drown, and the hundreds of others that arrived only to succumb to the strains imposed by their exhausting journey.”