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Something funny about the first Pfeilstorch being found near Klutz. Sounds Monty Python-ish.
"The africans learned to aim for the body and the Pfeilstorch went extinct"
Wondering what the bird must have been thinking.
Does this hurt the bird?
The interesting part is that before that people thought birds are changing form in winter or hibernate.
"some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater"

What did people in Africa think? I mean, they also saw birds disappearing.

IIRC there is an example in the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford, UK. The museum is packed full of amazing artefacts borrowed (ahem) from around the world and is well worth a visit:

https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

Crazy stuff: "white storks that are injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and return to Europe with the projectile stuck in their bodies", they apparently helped people in 1822 learn that birds migrate?! Was it not widely known before that? Cool!
TBF this is at least as much a story of the etymology of a German compound word as it is about natural science.

This should become some kind of business jargon aphorism: "Focus groups are the arrow storks of user migration" or something like that.

Migration was a theory but really been proven.
I saw a Canada goose with an arrow through its neck frequenting the retention pond near a community college where I worked. The arrow was almost parallel to the ground in orientation. I called a local wildlife rescue but never heard if they trapped the bird. Hopefully they did and were able to remove the arrow. I was surprised how well the bird was getting around.
That's a lot of extra drag for the poor stork, besides the pain of having an arrow in its neck
So King Arthur knowing that swallows fly south for the winter in Monty Python And The Holy Grail was anachronistic?
> The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It was carrying a 75-centimetre (30 in) spear from central Africa in its neck.[2][3] The specimen was subsequently stuffed and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock.

So, where Africans tried and failed, Germans succeeded.

The arrow must have been a drag. "I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the neck."