3/19/2023 0 Comments Lemmings jumping off cliffsStill, the facts haven’t mattered for the lemming’s public image. Today, it seems like nothing more than an exercise in animal cruelty. The unfortunate lemmings were then herded over a cliff and into the water below – creating the movie’s most dramatic scene. This created the illusion of large numbers of animals roaming the habitat, when in reality it was the same animals repeatedly passing by the camera. The film crew placed a relatively small number of lemmings on a turntable. It’s now well documented that this was not a migration at all the segment was filmed in Alberta, far from the lemming’s arctic realm. While the movie may now appear outdated and grainy, that sticky idea has lasted. It also convinced moviegoers that, when lemming populations grow too high, they migrate and commit suicide en masse The movie won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. It included a remarkable bit of lemming migration footage, including lots of the rodents plunging off a cliff: Then came a 1958 Disney movie, White Wilderness. The lemming stories remained in the realm of folklore for centuries. Some scientists, for instance, once believed birds hibernated under ground in the winter, not understanding migration). (Such stories may seem fanciful to us, but at the time they were considered scientific. They created stories to explain these happenings.Īs early as the 1500s, people told of lemmings raining from the sky. They may have even seen some that had slipped off cliffs. It’s much the same for lemmings (or Serengeti wildebeest or spawning salmon or any other large congregation of prey).Įarly observers likely noted super-abundant lemmings and saw many dead ones littering land and water. There are dead voles and bits of voles littering the ground. Many fall into streams and drown ( or are eaten by trout). Hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes and snakes dine frenetically on the abundant mammals. I’ve witnessed population explosions of voles, another small rodent. This may entail crossing rivers and streams, and invariably some drown. ![]() Lemmings will also migrate when their populations are high. When lemmings are super-abundant, there will be carnage: predators take advantage of the easy food source, as shown dramatically with the owl nest lined with 70 lemmings. As Smith writes, lemmings do have population fluctuations. How did such a fantastical story originate?Īs with many myths and tall tales, it is perhaps loosely rooted in real events. They may well be behind the snowy owl invasion occurring in the eastern United States, and lemming populations affect other wildlife from foxes to geese.īut of the many amazing lemming facts Smith described, he didn’t include lemmings leaping off cliffs. Ornithologist Joe Smith’s popular blog on Cool Green Science this week focused on how lemmings shape nearly every aspect of arctic habitats. Just don’t tell me that Jimmy the Groundhog (I live in Wisconsin-sorry, Punxsutawney Phil!) can’t predict the arrival of spring.It’s an enduring image: thousands of lemmings, mindlessly following each other over the cliff to their deaths. ![]() Captured lemmings were placed on a turntable to simulate the migration and chased over a cliff into the sea.Īlthough we’d like to think we’re more sophisticated today and skeptical than we were a few decades ago, still many animal photographs, posters, videos and “documentaries” are staged. In the second video, you’ll see how similar film footage was created. In great part, it’s how the lemming-suicide myth began. Watch the first video segment below, from the 1958 Walt Disney documentary, White Wilderness, Part II. This ebb and flow in their numbers is the result of a mass migration, which may include jumping off of cliffs into the water and swimming great distances to the point of exhaustion-even death. The truth is that every three or four years in some regions, the lemming population drops to near extinction then skyrockets again. Many people today, influenced by films such as the early Walt Disney documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s, still believe that on the Arctic tundra, lemmings running to a cliff and flinging themselves off is one of those flukes of nature. The top nature hoax-according to Animal Planet, the popular TV channel created by the BBC and Discovery Communications-is the suicidal nature of lemmings. A popular rumor about lemmings is that they commit mass suicide when they migrate, but the truth is much less dramatic.
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