Where Do Birds Go in Winter? The Moon
put two and two together: to easily understand the truth by connecting the clues in front of you
Every autumn, the storks vanished from Europe. Every spring, they came home. For two thousand years, nobody could prove where they went.
So people invented answers. In 1555, a Swedish priest wrote that swallows spent the winter asleep in the mud at the bottom of lakes. People believed him until the 1800s. Aristotle thought birds slept in holes in the ground. He also thought some birds changed into other birds. Others were sure the birds became mice.
Then an English priest named Charles Morton had a better idea. Mud was silly, he said. Birds have wings. Birds obviously fly somewhere. So they must fly to the Moon.
Morton was completely serious. He calculated the journey. About 125 miles an hour, he decided, and the birds would burn their body fat for energy along the way.
In the spring of 1822, a white stork landed near a German village. A 75-centimeter wooden spear was pushed straight through its neck. The bird was alive. It walked around. It did not seem very worried. Other storks kept pecking at the spear, trying to remove it.
The spear was African.
Anyone could look at that bird and put two and two together. The storks were not sleeping in lakes. They were not flying to the Moon. They were going to Africa, and in Africa, someone had tried to kill this one.
The unlikely survivor traveled all the way back to Europe carrying the spear with it only to be shot dead by a hunter.
It is still in Rostock today, spear and all.
Sample sentences
Nobody told me they were dating. I put two and two together when they arrived in the same car.
His story kept changing, and eventually the police put two and two together.
I saw the empty box in the trash and the crumbs on his shirt, and I put two and two together.
