African Wildlife & Environment Issue 85

GOOD READS

trip of 10,000 km each way every year.We know that sleek terns, swallows and falcons make very long migratory trips from the northern to the southern hemisphere and back, but who would believe a dumpy little thrush could achieve such fantastic flights? Ornithologists were also astonished to learn that Cattle Egrets had

rubbished by most northern hemisphere academic geologists, which this exceptionally hard-working and dedicated scientist found personally hurtful. In 1937 he launched Our Wandering Continents , a 390 page book which he dedicated to Alfred

managed to cross the Atlantic from Europe to colonise North America fairly recently. The key to the hardly believable trans-Atlantic journeys of Nick’s woodpeckers and the other birds of modest flying abilities is ascribed to the marine ‘floating islands’ of plant debris that are forcefully ejected from the mouth

Cattle Egrets (Photograph: John Wesson)

Wegener, who sadly had died during an expedition to Greenland before its publication Nick Norman writes: “ There has not, before or since, been a more comprehensive account written of the evidence supporting the theory of continental drift. Simply put, the book is a masterpiece.” Du Toit’s work subsequently received worldwide acknowledgement, his conclusions have stood the test of time, and his legacy lives on under the modern term of ‘plate tectonics’. He died in 1948 at the rather young age of 69. Ocean currents and prevailing winds can be invoked as the driving forces by which floating trees could cross the Atlantic from east to west. In a chapter subtitled “Where there’s a wing there’s a way”, Nick cites the amazing migration of the rather drab and unimposing Grey-cheeked Thrush that spends summer in South America after breeding in Siberia, Alaska and Canada, meaning a

of the copious, fast-flowing Congo River with such impetus that they travel about 800 km into the Atlantic, from where wind and currents seem to do the rest. We are reminded too that over a million years, a one-in-a-million chance is not impossible, and therefore it is more than likely probable! One has to think in geological time scales about these things… This book is an excellent, educational read, very well executed and illustrated, and highly recommended to students, teachers, WESSA members and all who are awe-struck by trees, birds, rocks and the never-ending revelations of our Wonderful World!

10 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 85 (2024)