People generally install computers in order to process data faster, and quickly identify connections that might otherwise pass unnoticed right? Not so the Manomet Bird Observatory, which, says UPI, has just announced in great excitement that a semiplamated sandpiper weighing less than an ounce recently set a record for the fastest long-distance flight by a bird when it flew from Plymouth Beach, Massachusetts to Guyana, South America, in four days; that’s the good news, the bad news is that they only know this because the poor aviator, tagged on August 12, 1985, was shot down four days later, 2,800 miles away, by a hunter who sent the tag on to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington; the data was fed into the computer and the record spotted – nothing wrong with that, you may say, except that the bird was shot on August 16 1985: between putting it through their computer and getting notified it took almost two years, but that’s how science progresses, says Observatory spokesman John Biderman.
