HILZINGEN, Germany — Johannes Fritz, a maverick Austrian biologist, needed a plan, again, to keep his beloved birds from going extinct.
To survive the European winter, the northern bald ibis—which once disappeared on the continent—needs to migrate south over the Alps before the mountains become impassable.
However, changing weather patterns have delayed the time when the birds begin to migrate, and now they are arriving in the mountains too late to overcome the peaks, leading them into an icy death trap.
“In two or three years they would be extinct again,” Fritz said.
So Fritz decided to teach the birds a safer migration route by guiding them in a tiny plane. And he was sure that he could do it—because he had done it before.
When Fritz was born 56 years ago, the northern bald ibis, a goose-sized black bird with a bald head and huge beak, could only be found in Europe in captivity. Around 400 years ago, the Europeans probably devoured the last of them.
But Fritz has dedicated his career to reintroducing birds to the wild and teaching the young the migratory path they will follow as adults. He learned to fly, modifying an ultralight aircraft so that it flew slowly enough for his winged students to keep up.
He was the sole provider of food, love and pampering to his students since they were a few days old, and the ibises enthusiastically followed their teacher. In 2004, three years after some initially rocky experiments, Fritz led the first flock from Austria to Italy and has led 15 migrations since. He has reintroduced 277 young ibis to the wild, many of which began to pass the route to their young.
But the route you originally taught is no longer feasible. With climate change warming the birds’ summer resorts — along Lake Constance in Germany and Austria — they now start their migration in late October instead of late September, as they had just a decade ago.
Last year, Fritz found snow covering the ibis’ feathers, their long beaks struggling to find grubs and worms in the frozen ground. Three ibis colonies each attempted twice to cross the Alps in November, but failed each time, and Fritz hypothesized that warm air flows were too weak in November to allow the birds to fly easily over the mountains. .
Fritz and his team lured the voracious animals with mealworms, trapped them in cages, and hauled them overland to the other side of the Alps. But a private transport service was not a sustainable solution, so Fritz came up with the idea of teaching the birds a new migratory route.
This summer at Lake Constance, humans and birds practiced escorted flights for their epic journey. By October, they hope to reach the southern Atlantic coast of Spain, near Cádiz, where the birds could spend the winter comfortably.
The new route, bypassing the Alps, is about 4 thousand kilometers, or three times more than the previous one directly south of Tuscany. Flying at a top speed of 25 mph, the journey is expected to take about six weeks, versus two to reach Tuscany. Still, “we’re optimistic that it will work,” Fritz said.
His plane is a three-wheeled vehicle attached to a parachute-like propeller and canopy, but Fritz insists it’s safe.
After the ibis were returned to the wild more than 20 years ago, Fritz found that spending generations in zoological confinement hadn’t lessened their drive to migrate, even if it had left them geographically uninformed. In their search for the “south”, some ended up in Russia.
Initially, Fritz was ridiculed for his idea of flying (scientists find that ibis are much less easy to train than geese and some other birds), but after years of trial and error, he succeeded.
Fritz once crashed into a cornfield so hard that his team feared he was killed. When they found him mostly unharmed, his first response was, “We need to fix this right away.”
Today he prioritizes safety, he said, in part because he is no longer the only one taking risks. The ibis are now raised by two research assistants, one flying on the back of Fritz’s plane, the other with a second pilot.
The unavoidable risks are “necessary,” Fritz said.
“It’s not so much a job, but the purpose of my life,” he said.
DENISE HRUBY. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6870165, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-29 21:10:09
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