Birds are metabolic dynamos, requiring food at regular intervals and in significant amounts; few old sayings are as completely false as to claim that… - Scott Weidensaul

Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one. Figuring out how they work as a herculean task, one with which humans have been grappling for a relatively short time. If you want clear-cut problems and need solutions, try geometry. This is ecology and it doesn’t get any more complex and messier than this. But we’re learning.

Some of these observations of “prairie pigeons” were made incidental to blasting them out of the sky; curlews, golden-plovers, godwits, and other shorebirds were treated much as passenger pigeons back East had been, with no-holds-barred slaughter. There are a number of accounts of gunners filling wagon beds with heaps of dead birds—then dumping the birds out to rot and filling the wagons all over again because the shooting was too good to stop.

To a layperson, this ebb and flow of scientific opinion, the flipflop of theory over time, the occasionally fierce and public disagreements between viewpoints, is as mystifying as it is frustrating… This isn’t a sign of science’s weakness, though, but rather its strength, always testing assumptions, making challenges, drawing new conclusions based on the latest evidence. It may err too far in one direction, then too far in the other, correcting as it goes, but every step eventually brings us all a little closer to the truth.