Before the nineteenth century, the winter disappearance of European birds prompted serious proposals that included hibernation in mud at the bottom of ponds and, in one seventeenth-century account, flight to the moon. Storks vanished each autumn and returned each spring with no known destination.
The bird recovered near Klütz in Mecklenburg in May 1822 carried an eighty-centimetre spear of central African origin driven through its neck. It had survived the wound, completed the migration north, and could not have acquired that weapon anywhere in Europe. The specimen, preserved at the University of Rostock, became known in German as the Pfeilstorch, or arrow stork. About two dozen similar cases were subsequently recorded.
The evidence was decisive for direction but not for route. That came later with ringing and satellite tracking, which showed storks avoid long sea crossings, relying on thermals that do not form over water, and funnel through Gibraltar and the Bosphorus in vast numbers.