Weird Stories We Tell Ourselves: Do Birds Fly to the Moon Every Winter?

Birds flying to the moon, sleeping at the bottom of lakes, or transforming into other animals? For centuries, bird migration evaded our understanding, and those wild theories were taken as true. Here’s a look at how the hypothesis of bird migration was tested, and how hundreds of people helped prove it!

Do birds fly to the moon every year when they disappear from our yards and parks? Perhaps they transform into other creatures or hibernate at the bottom of lakes! For centuries, these wild ideas were at the forefront of scientific belief. Our modern understanding of migration only caught flight with the help of two hunters, a stork, and a cross-continental letter-writing exchange of hundreds of people in the 1900s. All that just to collect the proof that birds didn’t, in fact, fly off to the moon for half the year.

By Sam Burns

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