A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
migration
Migration is regular, directed, seasonal movement between two ranges, and it is defined by the return. An animal that leaves and does not come back is dispersing; an animal that shows up in numbers somewhere unexpected is irrupting. Migration is a round trip on a schedule, undertaken by birds, whales, fish, bats, insects, turtles, and caribou, and in some cases by generations rather than individuals.
Etymology
The word is Latin for moving from one place to another, and it entered English in the seventeenth century applied to people before it was applied to animals. Until surprisingly late, the disappearance of birds each autumn was explained by hibernation in mud, transmutation into other species, or a journey to the moon, which was proposed seriously in print in 1703.
Notes
The question was settled by a stork. In 1822 a white stork was shot in Germany carrying a two-foot African spear through its neck, driven in and healed over, which established beyond argument that the birds were wintering in Africa and coming back. Around two dozen such storks were subsequently recorded, and they are called arrow storks in German.