• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1349 0

that the alternative of flying thousands of miles over open ocean can be preferable. With millions succumbing annually on these dangerous journeys, there is strong selective pressure on many birds to produce the navigational sophistication and the physical and mental attributes that create and maintain the migratory capacity and behavior. At least some migrants have evolved a new sense that we lack, the ability to detect the lines of magnetic orientation of the earth. Many have evolved to be able to read the star patterns and to navigate by the constant beacon of the North Star at night. In the day they may use the sun as a compass instead. They track its movement across the sky and calculate the movement with the use of an internal time sense that is accurate to within about fifteen minutes; hence they can ascertain direction to within about four angular degrees. Physiologically, birds have evolved cycles of rapid fattening in preparation for days of unremitting flight. And most of these capacities evolved because of winter, without which none of the kinglet’s almost unfathomable capabilities would have come into existence. We don’t specifically know how golden-crowned kinglets migrate, but since they show nocturnal migratory restlessness (Thaler 1990) they therefore probably fly and navigate at night in order to be able to refuel by day.

Kinglets’ evolutionary history, and hence their biology, is linked to the Ice Ages. As recently as ten thousand years ago when the winter snows melted, there was a large, relatively uninhabited portion of the globe where insects became available in almost unlimited quantities for fifteen to twenty-four hours per day for all who would come to harvest the bounty. In the fall, when the insects became unavailable and daylight vanished, the birds retreated south. Gradually as the glaciers melted, the birds’ annual journeys to and from the rich northern feeding grounds where the days were long, became even longer. Always it was those that either could stand the cold longest or that could fly the farthest that would collect the largest bounty in the spring. They, on average, left the most offspring. Parts of the population become reproductively isolated through the glaciers of this last and previous Ice Ages. Variations, which we often arbitrarily call species, were then created. One successful group was the kinglets, which now occupy the taiga forests of the north.

Few people ever get to see a golden-crowned kinglet, even if they are looking for them (and granted, most of the population is not looking for kinglets). Golden-crowns are very difficult to see, even without the dense cover of coniferous forest in which they live. Given that sightings are difficult, the best way of determining their presence is by listening for their calls. I’m happy to report that at least at the present time, this “little king” of the forest is doing well in the dense coniferous regions of northern New England. It is rare indeed that I do not hear their pleasant Tsees in the winter woods near my cabin. The wonder is how they survive a winter night.

Whenever I return to my heated cabin on a winter day, I can be secure in the knowledge that I won’t freeze to death. Our species has a magic key for winter survival. That key, as Jack London’s story told, is fire. Other human species, like the Neanderthals, also possessed that key for probably hundreds of thousands of years. Without it, humans would not have colonized the Northern Hemisphere of the globe across Europe, Asia, and North America, all the way up to the edge of the glaciers. Fire has not only helped keep us warm and alive in the night; it also allowed us to be better predators because by cooking our meat we use it as food more efficiently. And when we were still prey, fire was also a weapon for defense.

The kinglet has occupied the same circumpolar realm that we have, and it has likely done so for incomparably longer periods of time. It has the same requirement for heat, but raised to a much sharper edge. Given its minute, twopenny weight (5 to 6 grams),