Migration: quotes, facts and reflections

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Keep reading below, or choose a related topic to explore something different.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

WonderScience

In October 2022, a bar-tailed godwit only a few months old flew non-stop from Alaska to Tasmania: 13,560 km in 11 days, without once landing to eat, drink or rest.

The bird, a juvenile known as B6 (tag number 234684), had hatched in Alaska that summer. Researchers had fitted it with a small solar-powered satellite tag, so every stage of the flight was recorded. It set off on 13 October 2022 and came down in north-east Tasmania 11 days and 1 hour later. Guinness World Records lists the 13,560 km journey as the longest non-stop flight recorded for any bird. Godwits cannot rest on the sea, so a crossing like this has to be made in one go. Before leaving, they store more fat for their size than any other migrating bird studied so far, and their digestive organs shrink, which saves weight for the flight.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderMigration

Eastern monarch butterflies fly up to 4,800 kilometres from Canada and the United States to the mountains of central Mexico each autumn, yet no single butterfly makes the whole round trip: the yearly cycle takes about four generations.

The butterflies that fly south in late summer are a special generation: they live about eight months, while the summer generations before them live less than two. They spend the winter packed by the million on oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Michoacán and the State of Mexico, then start north in spring, lay eggs on milkweed in the southern United States and die. Milkweed is the only food their caterpillars eat. Their children and grandchildren carry on northwards. Where the monarchs wintered was a mystery until January 1975, when Kenneth Brugger and Catalina Aguado (later Trail), volunteers helping the Canadian zoologist Fred Urquhart, found the first colony.

Monarch butterfly migrationRead card

WonderMigration

Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific without compass, charts or instruments. They steered by rising and setting stars, the sun, ocean swells and seabirds, and kept track of speed and direction in their heads.

By the 1970s the old skills had almost disappeared, and some scholars argued that the Pacific islands had been settled by canoes drifting there by chance. The Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to test this with the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the small island of Satawal in Micronesia, where a closely related tradition survived. In 1976 he guided the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa about 4,000 kilometres from Hawaii to Tahiti without any instruments. The voyage showed that deliberate long-distance navigation was possible. Piailug went on to teach Hawaiian navigators, among them Nainoa Thompson, and traditional wayfinding has since been revived across the Pacific.

Polynesian wayfindingRead card

WonderTrade

The Columbian Exchange is the vast transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and the rest of the world that followed Columbus's voyage of 1492. Potatoes, maize and tomatoes crossed the Atlantic eastwards; horses, wheat, smallpox and millions of enslaved Africans were carried west.

The historian Alfred W. Crosby gave the process its name in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange. American crops changed diets across the Old World: potatoes helped Europe's population grow, maize became a staple in much of Africa, and chilli peppers reached India and Korea. In the other direction, horses transformed life on the North American plains, and cattle, sugar cane and wheat remade American landscapes. The heaviest cost fell on Indigenous Americans. Smallpox, measles and other diseases they had never met killed a large share of the population within decades, and the plantation economy that followed drove the forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans.

The Columbian ExchangeRead card

WonderMigration

Every year more than a million wildebeest, joined by hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, walk a great loop through Tanzania's Serengeti and Kenya's Maasai Mara, following the rains to fresh grass.

The herds have no fixed route; their path shifts each year with the rain. Early in the year hundreds of thousands of calves are born within a few weeks in the southern Serengeti. As the plains dry out the herds move north and west, reach Kenya's Mara in the middle of the year and return south when the short rains begin. The most dangerous moment is crossing the Mara River. A 2017 study found that on average about 6,250 wildebeest drown there each year, and their carcasses, some 1,100 tonnes, feed fish, crocodiles and vultures and fertilise the river for years. Grazing herds also keep the grasslands healthy.

Great wildebeest migrationRead card

WonderMigration

European eels live in the rivers of Europe and North Africa but begin life some 5,000 kilometres away in the Sargasso Sea, in the western Atlantic. Adults swim back there to breed, yet no one has ever seen them spawn.

How eels breed puzzled people for more than 2,000 years; Aristotle thought they arose from mud. In the early 1900s the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt spent almost two decades netting eel larvae across the Atlantic and found that they grew smaller the further west he went, until the tiniest turned up only in the Sargasso Sea. The larvae drift to Europe with the Gulf Stream and turn into transparent 'glass eels' as they near the coast. In 2022 researchers reported the first direct evidence of adults reaching the Sargasso Sea, after tracking satellite-tagged eels released in the Azores. No eggs or spawning adults have yet been found. The species is now critically endangered.

European eel migrationRead card

WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

Bantu migrationsRead card

WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

Indian Ocean tradeRead card

WonderOcean

Whales feed at depth and release nutrient-rich faeces near the surface, fertilising the phytoplankton, tiny drifting algae, at the base of the ocean food chain. Scientists call this the whale pump.

The term comes from a 2010 study by the marine scientists Joe Roman and James McCarthy, who looked at whales and seals in the Gulf of Maine, off the north-eastern United States. Many whales dive to feed and then rest and breathe at the surface, where they release loose, floating plumes of faeces rich in nitrogen. The researchers estimated that marine mammals return about 23,000 tonnes of nitrogen a year to the sunlit surface layer of the Gulf, more than all the rivers flowing into it combined, and that before industrial whaling the flow was probably much larger. Other studies found a similar effect with iron in the Southern Ocean. Because phytoplankton also absorb carbon dioxide, recovering whale numbers may help both ocean productivity and carbon uptake.

Whale pumpRead card

WonderMigration

Starting from Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago, seafarers speaking languages of the Austronesian family settled the islands of South-East Asia and much of the Pacific, as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and to the west reached Madagascar.

Most linguists, archaeologists and geneticists agree that the expansion started in Taiwan and reached the Philippines by around 2000 BC, though the newcomers mixed extensively with people already living in the islands. Sailing outrigger canoes, boats steadied by a float on one side, they carried taro, yams, pigs, dogs and chickens. From about 3,300 years ago a distinctive stamped pottery called Lapita marks their spread into the western Pacific. Navigating by stars, ocean swells and birds, Polynesian voyagers later reached Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, around AD 1250 to 1300. About 1,500 years ago others crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is why Malagasy is most closely related to a language of Borneo.

Austronesian expansionRead card

DriveMigration

During the Great Migration, from the 1910s to the 1970s, roughly six million Black Americans left the U.S. South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, reshaping work, politics, music and family life.

People left to escape Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and kept most Black Southerners from voting, as well as racial violence and poorly paid work as sharecroppers, tenant farmers paid with a share of the crop. Historians usually describe two waves: the first, from about 1916 to 1940, began when the First World War left northern factories short of workers; the second and larger wave ran from 1940 to 1970. Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles gained large Black communities. Migrants brought Southern music with them: Muddy Waters moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1943 and helped create electric Chicago blues. In the North they still met discrimination, including redlining, in which lenders and a federal agency marked Black neighbourhoods as too risky for home loans.

The Great MigrationRead card

WonderMigration

Pronghorn from Grand Teton National Park travel up to about 240 km (150 miles) between their summer range and their winter range in Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin. Roads, fences and new building now cut across this ancient route.

Pronghorn look like antelopes but are the last surviving members of a family found only in North America. They can reach about 88 km/h, a speed beaten on land only by the cheetah, yet they rarely jump: faced with a fence, they look for a gap to crawl under, so tight wire fencing can block a route completely. At Trappers Point, a narrow bottleneck on the route, archaeologists found remains of pronghorn hunts about 6,000 years old. In 2008 the US Forest Service designated the Path of the Pronghorn, the first federally protected wildlife migration corridor in the United States. In 2012, overpasses and underpasses built on US Highway 191 near Pinedale gave the herds a safe way across the road.

Path of the PronghornRead card

WonderMigration

The sardine run takes place off South Africa's east coast from about May to July, when vast shoals of sardines follow a band of cool water north along the shore. Dolphins, gannets, sharks, seals and whales gather to feed on them.

Sardines normally live in the cooler waters off South Africa's southern and western coasts. In some winters a narrow strip of cold water forms close to the shore of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, between the coast and the warm Agulhas Current, and the fish move north along it. The shoals can stretch for several kilometres and are followed from the air by spotter planes. Common dolphins herd the sardines into tight balls near the surface, Cape gannets plunge in from height, and sharks, Cape fur seals and Bryde's whales feed on the exposed fish. Scientists are still not sure what sets the run off: in some years it is weak or barely happens, and why is not fully understood.

KwaZulu-Natal sardine runRead card

DriveMusic

Delta blues is the guitar-and-voice blues that grew among African Americans in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century. Drawing on work songs, field calls and storytelling, it went on to shape later blues, rock and much of popular music.

Delta blues took shape among Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers who paid their rent with a share of the crop, and labourers in the Mississippi Delta. It drew on field hollers, the calls workers sang across the fields, on work songs and church singing, and on new guitar techniques such as sliding a bottleneck or knife blade along the strings. Charley Patton, often called the father of the Delta blues, and Son House played in juke joints, informal rural bars where Black workers gathered to drink, dance and hear music. Racial violence and the debts of sharecropping shaped the world the music came from. In the Great Migration many Delta musicians moved north; in Chicago Muddy Waters took up the electric guitar, and his electric blues fed directly into rock and roll.

Delta bluesRead card

StillnessMusic

Arirang is Korea's best-known folk song, sung in the North, in the South and by Koreans abroad. It exists in about 60 versions and some 3,600 variations, all sharing a refrain close to “Arirang, arirang, arariyo”, while the verses change with each singer and region.

Nobody knows exactly what the word “arirang” means. Many versions tell of crossing a mountain pass, and the verses often speak of parting, longing and hard work, though others are playful. The version most people know spread through Na Woon-gyu's 1926 silent film Arirang, made under Japanese rule and regarded as the first Korean nationalist film. Because the song belongs to both Koreas, it has served as a shared anthem: at the opening of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, athletes from North and South marched in together as it played. UNESCO added South Korea's Arirang to its intangible heritage list in 2012 and North Korea's in 2014, so the same song appears on the list twice.

ArirangRead card

DriveMusic

Taiko, Japanese ensemble drumming, took root in North America through Japanese American groups formed in California from the late 1960s. They built drums from whatever they could find, including wine barrels, and made playing together a way of building community.

In Japan, taiko simply means drum. The style of large, choreographed drum ensembles, called kumi-daiko, took shape after the Second World War, notably with Daihachi Oguchi's group from 1951. In 1968 Seiichi Tanaka founded the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, and in 1969 members of Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles formed Kinnara Taiko, making affordable drums from wine barrels. For many Japanese Americans whose families had been interned during the war, taiko became a way to claim their heritage in public. North America now has hundreds of taiko groups.

TaikoRead card

StillnessMusic

Morna is the slow, melancholy song of Cabo Verde, sung in the islands' Creole to guitar, violin and cavaquinho, a small four-string guitar. Its lyrics keep returning to departure, distance and longing, shaped by island life and generations of emigration.

Cabo Verde is a group of Atlantic islands off West Africa, settled by the Portuguese and by enslaved Africans. Poverty and drought have long driven its people to emigrate, and by many estimates more Cabo Verdeans now live abroad than on the islands. Morna's central feeling is sodade, a Creole word related to the Portuguese saudade: the ache for people and places far away. The poet Eugénio Tavares (1867–1930) and the composer B. Leza shaped its classic form. From the late 1980s the singer Cesária Évora, known as the 'Barefoot Diva', made morna known around the world. UNESCO added morna to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019.

MornaRead card

WonderFood

Breadfruit, a tree with large starchy fruit, was carried from island to island by Pacific voyagers over thousands of years. Many varieties have no seeds, so they travelled as living shoots, and islanders developed hundreds of locally named varieties.

Breadfruit was domesticated in the western Pacific, probably around New Guinea, and spread east with the ancestors of the Polynesians. Seedless varieties can only be grown from root shoots or cuttings, so voyagers had to keep young plants alive at sea, shielded from salt spray. A single tree can bear fruit for decades, and the fruit can be roasted, baked, or fermented and stored, which made it a staple food. In 1787 Britain sent HMS Bounty to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants for plantations in the Caribbean; the voyage ended in the famous mutiny of 1789. Today the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaiʻi, founded in 2003, keeps a large collection of varieties and helps spread them to tropical countries.

BreadfruitRead card

WonderHistory

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a Roman road map drawn on a parchment strip almost seven metres long but only about 35 centimetres high. To fit, it squeezes the shape of the empire so that roads, stopping places and distances stay easy to read.

The surviving map is a medieval copy made around 1200 from an ancient Roman original. It shows some 555 cities and 3,500 other place names from Britain to India; the westernmost section, with Spain and most of Britain, is lost. Its roads and stations reflect the cursus publicus, the Roman state's courier and transport service, which kept roads, inns and fresh horses ready for officials. The scholar Conrad Celtes found the map in 1494 and left it to the Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger, whose name it bears. Since 1738 it has been kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and in 2007 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Peutinger MapRead card