There is a wonderful film about these birds called "A Hundred Miles Home". The story prototype of this film is Bill Lichtman and his collaborator Joseph Duff. They tell the story of flying a light plane and teaching a group of Canadian geese how to migrate. The purpose of this activity is to save the endangered American crane. Bill Lichtman founded a charitable foundation called "Artificial Immigrants". According to its statistics, there are only 188 American cranes left in the world, and they all live in a huge crane group, which will only increase the danger of their extinction. ? Before Bill Lichtman started this activity, people could only save this species by keeping small American cranes in captivity, but this method didn't help, because during the growth of adult cranes, they didn't have the opportunity to learn about their migration routes, so they couldn't return to nature. Because they don't know how to migrate, winter comes, and they can only wait there to freeze to death.
Think of a way to lead American cranes raised in captivity by flying light planes to help them get familiar with the migration route. His plane can only carry one person, and the flight speed can be limited to about 45 to 93 kilometers per hour. So he began to test his plan with wild geese. Of course, wild geese are not in danger of extinction. Anyone who has played golf on the east coast knows that there are too many wild geese and their droppings are everywhere, so the border collie has a new job, which is to patrol the golf course and drive away the wild geese. That's not bad. Border collies just need something to do. If they are allowed to live a leisurely life, they will fidget.
Mr. Lichtman quickly proved that geese can fly in a light plane driven by human beings, with a one-way flight of 640 kilometers, and you can remember it as long as you fly once. Traveling 640 kilometers on the vast land without any marks, no one can remember the route at once, which shows that the migratory ability of birds is indeed a special gift. ? Realizing that he could guide geese in this way, he began to do experiments with sandhill cranes. Dune cranes and American cranes are close relatives, and they are not in danger of extinction.
1977, he took seven sandhill cranes from southern Ontario and flew to Virginia, also 640 kilometers away. These sandhill cranes spend the winter in Virginia. One day at the end of March, they went out for food and never came back. Two days later, Mr. Lichtman received a phone call from the headmaster of a school in Ontario, saying that he saw six big birds playing with the students on campus. Although they only flew once, six of the seven sandhill cranes flew 640 kilometers in the opposite direction and returned to Canada safely. Their destination is 48 kilometers away from where they grew up.
Many animals have extraordinary memory and learning ability in a certain field. Gray squirrels bury hundreds of nuts every winter, and each nut is buried in a different place, but they never forget any of them. They can not only remember the location of each nut, but also remember what kind of nut each nut is, and even remember when it was buried. Many people think that they only do this by making some marks or using their sense of smell, but this is not the case.
One day I was reading the gardening column in the newspaper, and I saw a letter from a reader asking the columnist if there was any way to get rid of the squirrels, because they had dug up her garden in a mess. The columnist replied that squirrels forgot where they buried nuts, so they dug everywhere. This statement is incorrect. Even if hundreds of nuts are buried in different places, they can remember the exact location of each nut. Dr. Pierre Rafer Neikes of the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the memory of gray squirrels, said: "They will use the information of their surroundings, such as the relative position between trees and buildings, and they can also use the angle and distance between some distant landmarks and the place where nuts are buried for triangulation."
No one can do that. Ordinary normal people often forget where they put their keys, let alone remember hundreds of nuts buried in different places. How long can a person live if he can only live on nuts buried in the ground? I'm sure I can't even survive the winter. Dr. Rafer Neikes said: "People can also remember some burial points (triangulating with landmarks to find the exact location of buried things), which may be six or seven, but this is far from being compared with squirrels." ? Most animals have such "superman" skills, and it can be said that all animals are stunted. Birds are navigational geniuses, dogs are olfactory geniuses, eagles are visual geniuses, and so on. These geniuses can be embodied in all aspects.