--- title: Migration: the great journeys — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Migration: the great journeys», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Migration is a long journey that animals make, often every year, between places that are good at different times: one for feeding, one for h --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Migration: the great journeys # Migration: the great journeys Lesson 54 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/0/) — Migration is a long journey that animals make, often every year, between places that are good at different times: one for feeding, one for having babies, one for surviving winter. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/2/) — Animals find the way with a whole toolbox: the Sun by day, the stars by night, coastlines and rivers, smells, and the Earth's magnetism, and a young cuckoo flies to Africa alone without ever having met its parents. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/3/) — Cartoons show birds flying south with suitcases and a map, and the old story said swallows slept at the bottom of ponds; scientists put tiny rings and trackers on birds and found out where they really go. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/4/) — The journeys are dangerous: crocodiles wait in rivers for wildebeest, city lights confuse night-flying birds, and roads cut across crab paths, so people now build tunnels and switch off lights to help. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/5/) — Barn swallows from Britain and Europe fly about 10000 km to southern Africa for winter, because there are no flying insects for them in a European winter. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/6/) — Arctic terns fly from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back every year, often 70000 km or more, the longest migration of any animal, and they see more daylight than any other animal: two summers a year give long days and plenty of food. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/7/) — About 1.5 million wildebeest, with zebras and gazelles, move in a great loop between Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains and fresh grass; their calves can walk within minutes of birth, because they must keep up with a herd that is always moving. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/8/) — Salmon hatch in rivers, grow at sea, and return years later to the river where they hatched, finding it mainly by smell, which they learned when young and remember for years; Pacific salmon usually die after laying eggs. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/9/) — Millions of monarch butterflies fly up to about 4000 km to the same mountain forests in Mexico; the trip north takes several generations, so no single butterfly makes the whole round trip, and the route must be inborn. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/10/) — Humpback whales swim thousands of kilometres between cold feeding waters near the poles and warm seas where they have their calves, eating almost nothing while in warm water. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/11/) — Geese fly in a V shape; each bird gets a little lift from the air swirling off the wing tips of the bird in front, and they take turns at the front. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/12/) — European eels swim thousands of kilometres to the Sargasso Sea to lay eggs, and the babies drift back on ocean currents; nobody has ever seen them lay eggs in the wild. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/13/) — Migrating birds use the Sun, the stars, landmarks, smells and Earth's magnetism; a bird using the Sun has an inner clock that tells it where the Sun should be at each hour, and experiments in a planetarium showed birds steering by the stars around the North Star. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/14/) — Every year tens of millions of red crabs on Christmas Island walk from the forest to the sea to release their eggs, which hatch in the sea, timed with the rains and the Moon, and people close roads and build crab tunnels and bridges. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/15/) — Young cuckoos are raised by other birds and fly to Africa alone, so the route must be inborn; trackers showed cuckoos crossing the Sahara in one flight lasting days. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/16/) — Bright city lights can pull night-flying birds off course until they tire out or hit glass, and some cities dim their lights in migration season to save them. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/54-migration-the-great-journeys/17/) — Dams on rivers, roads, new buildings and the loss of resting places along the way all make migration harder today. - ← previous: [How animals defend themselves](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/53-how-animals-defend-themselves/) - next →: [Sleep and hibernation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/55-sleep-and-hibernation/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)