Radiolab - There and Back Again

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Here's a simple question: When an animal disappears in the winter, where does it go? Oddly enough, this question completely stumped European scientists for thousands of years. And even today, the more we learn about the comings and goings of the animals, the deeper the mystery seems to get. We visit a Bavarian farm with an 11 year old, follow warblers and wildebeests around the world, and get a totally new kind of view of the pulsing flow of animals across the globe.   This episode was reported by Robert Krulwich and Jackson Roach and produced by Pat Walters, Matt Kielty, and Jackson Roach. Mix & original music by Jeremy Bloom.   Special thanks to Allison Shaw, David Barrie, Auriel Fournier, and Moritz Matschke. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  And check out: The Truth about Animals by Lucy Cooke No Way Home: The Decline of the Great Animal Migrations by David Wilcove  The migration video Jad and Robert watch in this episode!

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. C.

See? See? Yeah. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crulwich. This is Radio Lab. And we're going to begin today with a very simple question. A childlike question.

That's good. Okay, dokey. Which was asked by a child. And there's Robert. Hey, Martin. Hi, Robert. Who's now a man? Yeah, so I'm Martin Vichelsky.

I'm the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Onithology. Anyway, reporter Jackson, Roach and I, Hello. Hello, he's going to help me on this. We got together in the studio with Martin. Where do you start? Like, when were you born? What's your birthday?

Oh, that's in November 65. So November something, 1965? November 18, 1965. And on November 1865, where did you show up? Oh, that was in Bavaria? Bavaria is right next to Germany. where that is in the world. Bavaria's in Germany, yeah. In Germany. Okay. It's like, it's like the German heartland. The Iowa of Germany. Yeah. Except that we have mountains. Anyway, so Martin's a little boy

growing up in this small town in Bavaria. It's a tiny little village. I mean, the entire village is only about 50 people or so. My family was actually living in that village probably since it existed. 750 years old, the entire village. And they're all farmers. They're farmers all the way back. His grandfather's a farmer. His grandfather's grandfather was probably a farmer. So I basically grew up on a farm. So he gets to know all the animals of the farm, you know, goats and sheep and chickens. But there were also badgers coming or foxes coming. Wild animals. Cestrels. Barn swallows. And they are individuals and they're all different. And even as a young kid, he could recognize that this kestrel that showed up in the tree at the edge of the field would always be there at certain times of

day and he could sort of figure out like, oh, that's, you know, I don't know if he gave them names, but you do get to know individuals, you know, like an old friend. But one day, he's out helping out on the farm. He's about 11 years old, walking the cows to the fields to the pastures. And suddenly he sees these birds. Very odd birds. They're tall and skinny and white, and they have kind of like orange dinosaurs. sore crests and long, sharp beaks.

And Martin has never seen anything like them before. But... I had my camera with me all the time to take pictures. So he takes his camera out and he starts taking pictures of them. He looks and tries to figure out if they're like zoo escapees, but they don't have bands or anything on them. And they're almost dancing right with the cows. They're very, very close.

Some of them going up to the cows with these really long, sharp beaks and pecking at their eyes. Wow. And the cows let them. So for Martin, this is just totally weird. And he's just thinking like, what on earth are these things? And where do they come from?

Why are they here? And it was actually those questions that would set him off on a journey that would last kind of the rest of his life. First stop, his biology teacher. I had a really good biology teacher. So he goes, he takes the pictures that he's taken of these weird birds.

And his teacher is like, oh. Those are the cattle egrids. Cattle egrits. They're all over southern Mediterranean but also Africa. And Martin is like, I just saw a bunch of them here in Germany. You know, what are cattle egrids doing here? What could that be? And he said, well, I have no idea.

So his biology teacher doesn't know, but then someone says, well, there's a professor. Big professor in Munich. He just wrote two large volumes of the avie fauna of Bavaria, which is each, I think, 500 pages. all of the birds that live in Bavaria. And you should just go and ask him. You should go and see what he says. So Martin... Who remembers just 11 years old.

Gets on a train to Munich. I took the train into this big museum and met the guy. Tells him all about the birds. And he said, wow, that's really interesting. But we don't know why they would be here. So now Mr. 500-page bird book guy says, I don't know. Then he said, well, just go down to the max blank for onothology, the bird migration center and talk to those guys.

That's the big one. Yeah, some of the biggest discoveries in bird science have come out of Max Planck. Maybe they know. So Martin gets on another train and asks these guys, do you know why are these birds on my grandpa's farm? And they didn't. Nobody knows where they come from. Nobody knows where they go to. Nobody knows what's happening to them.

And I said, well, that can't be. I mean, you guys, you know, you're scientists. You have to know these things. So you're a meandering 11-year-old with a question that no adult could answer? Yep. And I realized that, you know, adults don't know anything about the world. It's just, you know, sort of a big enigma. Over the next 40 years, Martin will find that the movement of birds and not only birds,

but all kinds of animals all over the planet, which we see happening every fall and every spring, heading north, heading south, even though it seems sort of usual, This is one of those mysteries that only gets more mysterious when you look at it more closely. And when do you go to Costa Rica like tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or something? I'm going, no, I've decided I've to switch my plans. Oh my God, I'm so goddamn excited, Robert, guess what I'm doing? What?

I am going to the island of dwarf stone sloths in Panama. I have no idea what that means. Well, basically there's an island off the coast of Panama where the sloths have shrunk. to half the normal size. And they'd live off algae in these mangrove swamps that's got alkaloids with a similar property to Valium. And so they're stoned dwarf slots. It's an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

So before we get to Martin's lifelong search for the meaning and the mystery of migration, we start with our own investigation to the subject with our favorite untangler of animal mysteries, Lucy Cook. I'm the author of The Truth About Animals. And Lucy says people have been wondering about the comings and goings of animals across the seasons for a very, very long time. Oh, yes. This was a very old question indeed.

And she starts with the Greeks. The great grandfather of zoology, Aristotle. And he actually came up with three theories as to where birds disappeared to. The first one was migration. Brilliant, Aristotle. He should have just stopped there. But he went on, did he not? He went on, he went on, probably because the unlikely nature of tiny birds traveling thousands of miles on the wing, he came up with a couple of extra bonus theories. So Aristotle's second theory? Transmutation.

Huh. Yeah. He thought that much like Clark Kent and Superman, a lot of the birds weren't around at the same time. And they were a little bit similar. So you had winter robins that are sort of small birds with a red breast. were never around the same time as summer red starts. So he thought that the robins were transmuting into the red starts. I see.

They just changed their clothes. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, which is a sort of, it seems silly to us now, obviously. But if you think about it, back then, you know, we didn't even know that caterpillars turned into butterflies, which is just as ridiculous and fantastic. Okay, there's a third idea as well. Ah, now the third idea was considerably more enduring.

hibernation. Now, at the time, it was known that bats hibernated, and bats were often clasped as birds because they were fly-y things. So why not birds? And this idea stuck around for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Well into the 17th century. Scientists were debating if birds hibernated in trees or in small nooks or crevices. And the crazy rumor that was doing the rounds was that swallows hybernated underwater like fish. And one of the staunch anti-hybernation pro-migration theorist was a chap called Charles Morton, who was an Oxford-educated physicist and a very logical chap.

And he was like, well, don't be ridiculous. Of course this swallows can't be hibernating underwater. How would they breathe? No, no, no, no, no. They migrate to the moon. With all of the destinations to choose from, how did the moon enter this? Well, this was the 1600s and the telescope had just been invented. So people were able to observe the moon for the first time ever.

And previously, the moon had just appeared to be this sort of marble in the sky. And then thanks the telescope, it could be observed and it was found that it had mountains and craters and valleys. And it looked like, you know, according to Charles Morton, a perfectly reasonable place to holiday, if you're a bird. And he came up with this sort of wonderfully thought through theory about he'd worked out, he estimated how far the journey was. And, you know, he wasn't far off. I mean, he wasn't right, but he wasn't wildly wrong.

I mean, they wouldn't have known at that point that there's no air in space. That's right. Or gravity. Or gravity. So there was like, yeah, they might as just fly up to that big glowing thing up there. And that idea lasted a really long time until finally. Well. There was a breakthrough.

May 1822. So on May 1822, there was a German chap called Count von Boffner, and he was out in the grounds of his estate. In northern Germany, hunting. A venerable pastime for a German count. And while he's walking around gun and hand above him, he saw a flock of birds. So he takes his rifle, his big rifle, points it up to the sky,

and then... Falling from the blue. A stork. A white stork. Now, the count had shot down plenty of white storks on his property. But this time he shot down a stork that was an unusual stalk. And what was particularly unusual about this stork was that it had already been shot. But not by a gun.

It had been lanced by a spear. Sticking through this stork's neck. The bird. Spaghetti neck. Was this spear? Sort of half on one side and half on the other side, like a cabab. And the count had no idea what to make of this. So he sent the stalk off to a local university,

and one of the professors there deduced that the spear in question had been, and I quote, thrown from the hands of an African. The spear is African. Yeah. The spear is of African make. Where in Africa did the spear, did he say specifically where it came from? He didn't say specifically.

I think the European perception of African. Africa is very limited at that point. But yeah, what's important, though, is that they knew the spear came from somewhere in Africa. And so it was assumed that the stork must have traveled to Africa in order to have been speared. Wait, so a stork would have flown from somewhere in Africa with a spear through its neck? Yeah. What a valiant, heroic stork. Well, until you find out that it's not the only one.

What do you mean it's not the only one? There are others? Well, a few years after the... The first stork got shot down. Another one also got shot down. Same deal with a spear thrown by someone in Africa? Yes, but with a spear and everything. And then another one.

And then another one. There's actually 25 that have been collected over the years. Wow. They're called, I'm going to pronounce this totally wrong, but file storks. And these storks seemingly flying all the way from Africa with spears stuck in their necks. Helped solve one of the greatest mysteries in biology. and that is the question of where birds disappear to over winter. So these storks were the thing that finally convinced people

that when birds vanish in the winter, they're not hibernating, they're not flying to the moon, they're not transforming into other birds. They're just migrating. And then what they did most crucially was that they inspired the idea that you could tag birds. Like scientifically track their birds. migrations by just putting little metal bands on their legs or in their ears. And so this whole new field of science starts up. One of America's most spectacular birds is the sandhill...

They start tracking all kinds of birds. The waterfall. And then mammals, fish, whales. Many species of large shark and giant manorrays. Game Rangers capture animals in just about every way possible. With nets, rope, tranquilizer guns, even with our bare hands. Each collar contains a tiny radio transmitter that sends out a powerful signal through this antenna. They'll swim in three months, nearly 5,000 miles to carving grounds in Mexico.

The caribou. The giant liverback turtle. The wildebeest and zebra in this part of Africa have followed the seasonal rains. And they start to realize that it's not just like this isolated little quirky phenomenon in a couple of species. Migration is everywhere. And so this is when we come back to Martin, the boy from the beginning of the story with the question. He grows up, but he stays fascinated by this question. And he starts chasing answers to it.

He goes to school. He studies migration science and birds. I learned how to ban birds myself. He starts chasing birds tagged with radio transmitters around the Midwest. He has to capture them every night. So he drives up to random people's farms in the middle of the night. Because, say, a thrush just landed there after a, night's flight somewhere in middle of Iowa,

northern Wisconsin, or somewhere, knock on the door and you want to talk to the guys and say... So there's a bird. I need to... Can I come into your backyard? And then inside you just hear, chich. So then you say, well, you know, maybe I don't need to recapture.

That's your version of a door slam? No, that's the gun being loaded. And then you think, well, maybe I don't need to catch this animal again. Did you ever? get shot at or arrested? We did get arrested, but that was in, well, different places. Algeria once and a few other places. But as his career went on, the tracking devices he was using got more and more high-tech.

Nowadays, it's really almost like your cell phone. You have a little, you have a GPS receiver that gives you in GPS point every second. Coming from a tiny transmitter that's attached to the bird's back. It's a little tiny box that's like about 25 grams. It's like a chewing gum box or so. A chewing gum box. We can do better. Can you think of it?

Let's say it's about a quarter of a snicker bar. Okay. All right. And that is sending you all this information. But where does the information go to? To an antenna or to a... Well, it's going to cell phone tower. And via the cell phone network, it's going to MoveBank, which is this database for animal movement.

that collects migration data from thousands and thousands of animals. So it's only relatively recently that we've had the technology that enables us to really track these species. This is David Wilcove, biology professor at Princeton University. So we're only now beginning to piece together the journeys that these species have been making for millennia and that have been fascinating us really for as long as people have been looking up and seeing a flock of birds flying over. or watched a butterfly drifting by. And when you look at what we now know about these journeys, some of them are just unreal.

For example, there's a bird called the Arctic Turn, which is born up, of course, in the Arctic, in the spring and in the summer, where it's just sunshine all the time, almost 24 hours a day. But when the fall comes, like the sun starts to vanish, and this bird needs sunshine. So it has to chase an endless day, which means it has to go all the way to the other side. of the earth to the Antarctic to find the same conditions.

Wow. And then when the Antarctic begins to lose its sunshine, it has to come all the way back again. So this is a bird that has to transect the globe chasing the sun. Or a monarch butterfly flapping its way from New York State to central Mexico, that's really a piece of Kleenex, flapping its way to this particular site. And it's never been there before. Its parents have never been there before. Its grandparents have never been there before.

By virtue of the weird intergenerational migration of monarchs, it's going to a place that its great grandparents left. Or here's one. There's a dragonfly that is born in a pond is sucked up by evaporating air, hits a monsoon cloud, goes into a jet stream, goes across India, across the Indian Ocean, the East African coast, the clouds reverse, and it goes back in the other direction, what amounts to a 10,000 mile journey, always in the cloud. And the cloud, when it rains, dumps it onto the ground.

It has a new baby, and the baby takes off and is flown up in the air. So there's this weird Pogo stick existence. Wow. And when you put all these journeys together, they can actually kind of visualize it. They can put it on a map and animate it. Okay, here. Come closer.

All right, we are opening up a huge. YouTube video here. And MoveBank has published these videos of this, which you can just search and find on YouTube. Okay, here we are. We're starting now. It's winter for the top of the globe. So you start to see these purple veins appear on the bottom, bottom of Africa. Now the veins are flowing up toward. Floor. What is this region right here? This is like Scandinavia. Yeah. So there's like, this is filling with birds probably. And fish. What you'd see is basically all these different points of light, each one is representing a tag on an animal. And as the clock ticks forward and the seasons change, all of these little points of light

start moving. It's just like this entire like rush of all of these like lines suddenly shoot down to the bottom of the planet. Right. It does remind you of like blood flow in a body. Yeah. The animal movement paths look like these, you know, art. This is Amanda Subouloski, a University of Florida professor.

She studies the wildebeest migration in Africa. And she said, you know, this is really more than just a visual metaphor. All these animals moving around the planet really do form. Kind of a global circulation between different regions of the world. Sometimes really vast regions. Take, for example, the wildebeest. They can get swept downstream and miss them. Amanda says thousands of them will cross these rivers during the migration, and they don't all make it.

So in the months that follow, up to half of the fish diet is comprised of wildebeest carcass. So as these animals move around the planet, they move what they poop around, what they eat, when they die, how they decompose. They move not just themselves, but bits and pieces of the world. It does give you the sense that these animals really are, like the lifeblood of the planet,

flowing away from their home and then coming all the way back again. And then going out again and then coming back again and out and back. And out and back. But when you zoom in on this global flow to all the individuals who actually made these journeys, that's not trivial. I mean, this is halfway around the world. You find yourself asking, why are they doing that? How do they go there?

How do they find back to this net? And that's when things get really messy and beautiful and totally unexpected, as you will discover in just a moment or two. Okay. My name is Tsipora calling from Seattle. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.s.

Robert. Radio Lab. We are back with Robert and Jackson Roach and migration. Right. So before the break, we had scientists that were gathering up all this migration data and turning it into a kind of global story of animals moving from place to place across the earth. Yes. I think we're getting a lot more knowledge about the collective behavior of these individuals,

giving us a completely new emergent knowledge about life. We are just entering the... what I call the golden age for studying migration. But even with all their new gizmos and their measurements, people like Martin and David will tell you that the most basic facts about migration still remain deeply mysterious. Yeah, I find the whole phenomenon of migration,

so mind-boggling that... What is it that most boggles your mind about the whole thing? The mind-boggler. That they pull it off, that they do it. And really the simplest question, question you could ask about all this is why? Why migrate at all? I mean, you know, for some animals, it seems sort of obvious. Makes sense that if you like to eat insects or float on fresh water and you happen to be up in Maine where it's going to get snowy and cold,

makes sense that you're going to want to get out of Dodge or Portland. So that part makes sense. The part that's a real puzzle is, why do you go so far? Why does the Black Pole Warbler that was up in Maine go to the Amazon? Couldn't you have stopped over in Fort Lauderdale or Cuba or Guatemala? I don't think anyone really knows what's going on there. The best anyone can say is that over thousands and thousands of years, individual creatures would go just a little bit first. somewhere and then a little further still, looking for greener grass or more insects in the late afternoon,

until they ended up thousands and thousands of miles away from where they started. But that raises an even harder question, right? Like, if you're a warbler that made it from Maine all the way down to the Amazon where it's warm all year, why not just stay there? Yeah. So the hard part is always why come back? This is Ben Winger. He's an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan.

The amazing thing about migration is not so much that these organisms accomplish this journey, but that they're doing it just to come back to this one place. Ben says the craziest thing is that so many of these animals come back not just to the same general area, but to the exact same spot. Yeah. For birds, it's often the exact same tree where they built a nest the year before. That's one tree of a trillion trees in the world. And all kinds of animals do this.

Yeah, the alewife will do that. You know, they'll go to the ocean. Amanda Sibuliski told us that the alewife, footlong, little silvery fish, is born in a freshwater lake, then spends its life swimming around the open ocean, all just to come back to that same lake. Imagine a small alewife in the vast ocean, returning to the very inland lake where it was born to spawn again. On the face of it, some of these migrations are extremely illogical.

Consider the sea turtle. According to University of North Carolina biologist Ken Lohman, there are turtles that have feeding grounds in Australia within, oh, five or ten miles of a really good nesting beach that other members of their own species will use. But instead of nesting at this location that's just 10 miles away, they'll swim literally 700 miles to get back to their home area. To exactly the same beach.

And if you think about that, a turtle could go to any European, beach, any African beach, any South American beach, or any North American beach, if it's an Atlantic Turtle. And yet, for some reason, they choose the one where they were born. Wow. That's just astonishing to me how that can even happen. And the fact that it does happen does suggest that the drive for it to happen is very, very strong.

Nobody really knows what drives that drive, but one of the ideas floating around has to do with the fact that getting born in the wild, very, very hard thing to do. A female sea turtle, for example, will lay roughly 2,000 eggs in its lifetime, and probably only two of her babies are going to survive. Yeah, and if you think about what is required for a good nesting beach for a turtle, there's really a very long list of requirements. Just to name a few, the beach has to have the right slope. The turtle has to be able to get out of the water. Once the turtle's on the beach, the sand has to be loose enough for it to dig a nest. The temperature has to be exactly right.

It can't be too wet. It can't be too dry. It has to have the right kind of vegetation, and it can't have too many egg-eating ants. In addition, there can't be too many predators. And so from the Mother Turtle's perspective, the only place in the world that is absolutely certain to have everything exactly right is the beach that she herself hatched out on. It's always the best bet. So it's probably the case that many animals have a... kind of a home sweet home sense.

This like hardwired compulsion to go home, no matter how far away it is, no matter how risky it is to get there. You know, it doesn't matter how long you study migration. The fact that that is built into this creature is endlessly fascinated. No, it is. And it's like it's a toaster or something. It's like a machine thing. I would be rooting for creativity.

So that's the whole thing with so. So at this point, this is where I dig in. on this. I just always wondered when you watch all these animals moving back and forth across the earth, are you watching just, you know, puppets on the end of some kind of genetic code? Is it all just wrote? Well, or is there some kind of will and some kind of play and some kind of improvisation? Isn't that one of the questions or is that already? Oh, it's one of the most important questions. You know, can they adjust their migratory behavior in the face of climate change? or habitat loss.

And to answer that question, we're going to need to be able to track individuals over multiple migrations, and we're going to need to be able to track lots and lots of individuals in a given migration. And I think that's something that we can do now for the first time on a global scale. So again, this is where we come back to Martin.

He's now the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, which is the place he visited as a kid looking into the cattle egrits. And while on the one hand, the data they're gathering about all these different migrating animals is giving them a lot of info about their collective behavior. But then on the other hand, we're getting much more information about individuals. They're gathering an astonishing amount of data about particular animals. We get acceleration behavior, so it's really, we know when it sleeps and when it's active,

and all of that they are pecking, if they are walking, if they are swallowing. Oh, so you can read from these monitors, you can read, now he's on the ground. Now he's pecking, pecking, packing, packing, packing. Exactly. Now he's up in the air, now he's on the ground again. These recreations of behavior, these sort of little movies that you can make. And once you get to those tiny little stories, then a whole other world opens up to you. I mean, we had a stork that went to an area where no other stork was at the time.

So Martin now lives in this little town called Rattelsfeld, where the Max Planck Institute is. And every year he and the other migration scientists go out and tag all of the storks in the area so they can watch them move around town and eventually come fall, migrate. They circle up to the clouds and fly around and test their flying abilities and so on. And then they go on this big voyage. And one year, when all of the storks take off, Martin is sitting there at his computer, watching these dots, these clouds of dots, move off in different directions. And he's watching one cloud of dots, which is going east, sort of through Eastern Europe,

and then start to curl around the eastern edge of the Mediterranean to go south into Africa. We had a bunch that went to Africa. And then he sees that one of the dots, one of these storks, just sort of peels off. Yes, so that actually was Hansi. Hanzi. Apparently they name the storks when they tag them, so Martin actually knew specifically which one this was. Anyway, Hansi.

He was in an area where no other stork was at the time. Oh, so they saw like a little blip of purple peel off? Yeah, peel off from the group. In the southeast of Turkey, close to the Syrian border. And he drops down into a patch of what seems to be utterly ignorable ground in the Middle East all alone. Like there's no other storks there. So we wanted to know why did he choose to, you know, stay, spend his winter close to the Syrian border in an area where usually no stork winters.

Who's the we in this story? Oh, it's just, well, in that case, it's my partner. She's also a scientist. My name is Ushie. Ushie Muller. Ushy Muller. But the U, you know a U. German U.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And do you, like, do you remember? Remember, Hansi? Yes, I do. They told me that there is a stalk. He tried to go to South, and then he decided to stay in Turkey.

And you're thinking, what's with this guy? He's like, didn't he get the memo? Are you supposed to go South? Yes. You know, migration is a survival strategy. So if you're not migrating, you're probably in trouble. And Martin and Ushie are thinking, well, what happened here? Did he get hurt, badly hurt?

Or maybe he made a really stupid decision. and is now going to starve to death. So they figured we know exactly where he is. Let's go see him. Yeah, I wanted to come along. I wanted to see that because I'm so interested. And it's also kind of an adventure to follow the bird, to see what he's doing. I mean, it's actually an interesting way to have not your local travel office guide you to a place,

but animals, they guide you to interesting places. We flew into the Turk, to Istanbul, rent a car, and then tried to find the bird. So they hop in the car, they start driving around, and they have their phones or their laptops or whatever out. And they're watching this little dot, which tells them basically exactly where Hansi is. Down to the closest two meters or so. Oh, wow. But only at a specific time. Turns out the way this device works is that it sends out its data to a cell tower, if it can find one.

but only once a day. Only at basically noon or noon plus three minutes. So you have to drive. So that means you get close and then you have to wait a day to take your next move, I guess. Exactly. So you just go to a place and there was nobody. And then you wait for the next day and you realize, oh, he left an hour before you were there and flew another 20 kilometers.

So you had to go, he had to pack up your stuff and go to a different town and find a different to tell and different place to stay and try to do the same thing over again. Now, they know if they can get close enough, they can pick up a radio signal from the tracking device too. So each day they're coming into some town that they think Hansi was nearby, at least, and driving around the area, sweeping for a signal. We followed him, I think, for two or three days. Days? And then finally?

We got a signal in the... in the early, early morning, it was dark. And then... They get up, start driving around. We try to find... To come closer to the bird with the antenna, we hold outside of our car. And then the signal became louder and louder.

And eventually, they get to a field where the signal is really strong. And stayed there in the car till the daylight comes a little bit. And just as the sun was coming up, we saw him. Feeding on a field? Yeah, in an old field with a little ditch next to it. This tall, white bird, all alone, no other storks in sight.

And he looked fine. He was just walking around, feeding on frogs and snakes and whatnot. So he was having a good time there. So are you thinking good for you? you've actually discovered a restaurant on the outskirts of town that none of the other storks know about. Yeah, yeah. You know, Frog City or something.

Frog City. So what do you make of the fact that this joke, is this just an errant rogue stork getting lucky, or is this the beginning of something? Well, it may be just Darwin. It may be that, you know, when you get a population group and they all, on average, do one thing,

that nature kind of requires it, someone on the edge do something else. There's probably selection for at least some portion of the progeny to wander farther afield. So that just in case there's a creature around who can handle a new environmental challenge. It's actually probably those innovative individuals that really, in the end, are really important for that entire species to thrive. but because they have, they explore novel ways to do things. Wow. So there are, this is not robot land where animals, you know, awake to a particular instinct and just fly as best they can to a goal.

This is like full of, I think I'll go east this year. I think I'll go south next year like somebody taking a vacation. Exactly. In the old days, we always talked about sort of an average animal, you know, the storks, they fly there and they go here and whatever. But none of the individuals really do that. They all do totally different things. But if you have average it out, then, yeah, you have sort of the average German goes to the beaches in Spain in summer. But yes, there are a few people that do that.

But there are so many others that don't do or do different things or do it one year and go to some totally different place the next year. And there's the one who goes to Norway and you think, what's with that guy? Exactly. I did notice when we were looking at the flow patterns of migrations, you have broad strokes, big aggregate flows from one spot in the globe to another. But all along those routes, you see little wisps shooting off in opposite directions. Right. And there's a larger thought here, which is if all migrations were just instinctual, and if the world is going to change in any dramatic fashion, that all these animals would be in the wrong place, in the wrong season, and be dead. But if in every population there's somebody sitting there who's like Hansi, who didn't follow the rules and didn't do what everyone else was doing, then Hansi gets to be the one who's fed and has the children and keeps the species going.

I mean, do you see Hansi writ large, though? Do you see a lot of these birds? Like, do you ever see a moment where Hansi says to the other birds, hey, guys, this field is great? We don't have to go all the way over there. Let's just come here. It's so much closer. There are all these frogs. Jackson asked that very question.

Could the other storks hear about Hansi's weird trip and say, oh, maybe I should try that? Yes, because we know that they learn socially. They communicate and they learn from each other. We still need to understand the extent of that and how exactly they communicate and what they tell each other. But they do follow each other. And if there's somebody who knows exactly where to go and is totally determined to go there, It's easy to imagine that others follow because they realize something good has happened there, must have happened there. So maybe Hansi is the beginning of a chapter, chapter of storks.

Maybe. But most storks that are changing their migrations, instead of going to a cool field full of delicious frogs, are going to garbage dumps in Spain and quitting, migrating entirely? Yeah, no, they are. Lucy Cook, our mistress of the history of animal mystery, actually, did follow an individual store. You know, you can get this app where you can follow the birds that have been tagged yourself. And I followed one for six months and he basically never really left.

In fact, I don't think he even bothered going back north again in the spring. Just stayed by the dump the whole time. Oh, that is depressing. Yeah. Yeah. And the truth is what we heard from pretty much every scientist we talk to is that for lots and lots of animals, land, sea, water, migrations are declining and in some cases disappearing because we are altering their habitats, we're creating all sorts of barriers to those journeys, and we're changing

the climate. And what the future brings is anyone's guess, but the coolest thing of all, really, is that as we speak, Martin has placed a box in the space station above the earth. And that box will very soon begin to collect the data from all of the animals. Species across species across species, crawling, swimming, sailing, whatever, across the earth. And they're all going to report to this box at the same time. And then we, we who have computers all over the world, can watch the full ballet ourselves in real time. Oh, wow.

Or we're going to watch this ballet that's been happening on the planet. for millions of years and has been part of human existence forever disappear. But, I mean, however the story goes. Whatever the story goes, we'll have a front seat in what will either be a very sad show or maybe one will be cheering for Hanses in the whale community. Hanses in the plover community. Yeah. This story was reported by Robert and Jackson Roach.

And it was produced by Jackson with Pat Walters and Matt Kilty. And I should also give a special thank you. to Joel Berger, Berndt Heindrick, Bill Cochran, and Isabel Houghton. Special thanks to our yodlers,

Ali Deneen and Gregory Corbino, to Jeremy Bloom for his mixing and for his original music. And of course, to Mr. Bobby Kaye and Jackson Roach. Yeah, thank you. Can I just,

I just want to say one more thing because migration is, like, something you can obviously look at in this kind of, like, science-y way, and that's great. It's really cool. But it's also just like a,

a kind of like a basic human experience to look up at maybe the geese in North America and just think like what is it like up there to be totally free of all of our stuff down here borders and all the things that get in our way and so Martin while he's amazing at the hard science side of things he's also curious about that experience of like what it's what it feels like to be a migrating animal. And at a certain point in his life, he decided to sort of try to find out. I bought a hang glider,

then went up to the mountains, and I wanted to understand what the birds experience in the air. I mean, learn things about the air that usually you just don't know. I mean, in the hang glider, you are the bird. You are sort of the body of the bird, and you have your wings that you fly,

left or right and you just fly with your hands, with your just moving your body around. We had days when we couldn't even get down to the ground because the uplift was so strong. We had days when we flew into the night because over a swampy area late at night, there's an updraft. And I wanted to know any time, you know, when it was a little misty, foggy, in the valley, and you are immediately feeling the air. You know, if there's an updraft, you get, you feel it immediately. And you can turn yourself directly into an updraft. Fly up in a thermal, you're up at 4,500 meters,

and there are people climbing those mountains. They're up on the glacier, and you fly over there and you sort of shout down to them and say, hi guys and you know because you're just 50 meters above them that's that's absolutely amazing and then you take off and fly to the next mountain peak and it starts to drizzle and starts to rain and it starts to snow up there you know you're you're in the in the realm of of the weather or the closest to a bird you can ever get hi this is rubin from pasek new jersey radio lab is created by chat abumrod with robert crorwich and produced by soren wheeler dylan keef is our

director of sound design, Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bessel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Anna McEwan, Latif Nassar, Sarakari, Arianna W. Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Marion Reno, and Russell Gregg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.