alt Hacker NewsI remember being fascinated by animals as a kid and the mystery of where eels went was one of the big unsolved puzzles I remember hearing about.
Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent. Worth investigating if you are curious :)
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I find it very hard to believe that people in the middle ages (or before or after) looked at birds and actually thought that they really spawned from trees or barnacles. After all, birds can fly, you observe large flocks of birds in the sky right before they vanish, you know that there are warmer regions in the south, so it's not a big stretch to imagine that birds could perhaps migrate southwards. You cannot prove it, but it's a good enough guess.
I think illustrations or stories from the middle ages are to be taken as symbolic or allegorical rather than factual like a biology book would be today. They wrote down a story not because they necessarily believed it be factually true, but because it taught a different kind of truth. For example, no one has ever believed that Red Riding Hood actually happened or that you can cut open a wolf's stomach to pull out a living person.
This is a good video on that medieval belief:
Medieval Science was Baffled by Birds - CuriousCabinet123
> it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent.
I think that was just a way to ethically cheat the fast...In southern Germany they got around it by wrapping the meat in a dumpling (Maultaschen), so that god wouldn't notice: "The Swabian German nickname for the dish, Herrgottsbescheißerle, means "small God-cheaters""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maultasche#History
EDIT: just remembered another similar cheat, where beavers were defined as fish, allowed to be eaten at lent.