“Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming.” We’re so consumed by our own achievements that we think of the Book of Jeremiah, from which this quotation is drawn, as ancient and reverent.
It dates to about 600BC, but the migrating birds that Jeremiah saw have been making the same journeys out of Africa since the end of the last ice age. The species themselves – storks, kites, eagles, swifts and swallows – and their north-south migratory pattern probably date back millions of years, before there was a hominid species to observe them.
