About storks and migrating birds

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macdoum
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Re: About storks and migrating birds

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There is a plan to fit the International space station with a tracker to follow the migration of all sorts of migrating species;
Article Telegraph/Observer
Environment Birds

Birds' migration secrets to be revealed by space tracker

Icarus, a wildlife receiver circling above Earth, will monitor the epic journeys of tiny birds and insects, helping to warn us of volcanic eruptions and to protect us from diseases
The new radio transmitters will help provide more information on the migratory habits of birds such as the wood thrush. Photograph: William Leaman/Alamy


Small birds, butterflies, bees and fruitbats will be fitted with tiny radio transmitters and tracked throughout their lifetimes from space when a dedicated wildlife radio receiver is fitted to the International Space Station next year.

The ability to follow the movements of very small organisms hour by hour from space will revolutionise our understanding of long-distance bird migrations, and give advance warnings of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And it should also help protect human populations from animal-borne diseases like Sars, bird flu and West Nile Virus, say conservationists.

Many animal species migrate continuously but biologists know the exact movements of only very few, mostly large ones. But the low-orbit Icarus wildlife receiver circling 200 miles (320km) above Earth should allow even butterflies to be followed, said Uschi Müller, co-ordinator of the €40m project, which is backed by the German and Russian space agencies and 12 scientific groups.

"To start with, Icarus scientists will use 5g transmitters but in the future we will use much smaller ones, under 1g, which will allow us to follow insects. It will be used for conservation, health and disaster forecasting", she said.

Because animals are known to sense imminent tectonic activity, she envisaged birds and other animals living near disaster-prone zones being fitted with the transmitters. "It could give people an extra five hours warning of a disaster," said Müller.

Rapidly developing miniature telemetry using satellites has already helped ornithologists understand the start of the British spring. Transmitters the size of a three-amp fuse have been fitted for three years to 13 British cuckoos. Last week scientists could see they were on their way back from the Congo rainforest.

The birds, given names like Whortle, Patch, Ken and David by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which started to tag them in 2011, will not finish their 4,000-mile annual journey until mid-March at the earliest. But the tiny 5g transmitters show that one cuckoo called Skinner flew nearly 800 miles north last week, stopping briefly in Gabon, and is now in southern Cameroon. Others are on their way back from lakes and rivers in Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea.

The mystery of exactly where the world's 10-20 billion migratory birds go and how they navigate perilous journeys across continents and oceans without experience or guidance from parents has long puzzled people.

"All we knew until we attached the tracking devices to cuckoos was that British birds left in a south-easterly direction and that there was one record of a ringed bird found in Cameroon in 1938. It was a very big surprise when we found that nearly half were leaving in a south-westerly direction and migrating via Spain and west Africa," said Chris Hewsom, research ecologist at the BTO.

Moreover, Hewsom has found that Welsh, Scottish and English cuckoos all take different routes to and from Africa. Some make 1,850-mile detours, others zig-zag across the Sahara and some have found several ways to navigate the Mediterranean.

One Welsh cuckoo, David, reached Somerset last April but turned back possibly to wait until the weather warmed up or because he found his favourite caterpillars had not emerged from a particularly long winter.

"Every time we put a tracking unit on a bird we find something incredible. Our knowledge is exploding. We are getting answers to questions which have been around for years. We are now able to precisely identify the routes they take, where they stop to feed, even how high they fly," said Bryan Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at William and Mary college in Virginia, US.

Watts, who tracks whimbrels, which breed in the high Arctic and winter in Venezuela, says satellite tracking has opened up a new world. "We were astonished to find the first bird that we tracked made a 3,500-mile nonstop flight from Virginia to Alaska, flying 35-40 mph for five solid days. We don't know how they're capable of these types of flights."

Others, he has found, take a massive detour towards Africa to avoid "hurricane alley", an area of warm water in the Atlantic stretching from the west coast of northern Africa to the US Gulf Coast where most hurricanes start. "They went right off the continent unexpectedly. It was amazing," he says.

Until 10 years ago, satellite tracking was used only on large animals which could be fitted with powerful transmitters with long lives, but the new solar-powered devices only switch on when a satellite passes overhead, and are getting smaller every year.

"By next year we hope to have devices that weigh just 2g, which will be small enough to place on songbirds like wood thrushes, warblers and finches," says Hewsom. "These will allow us to track birds like nightjars, too. We are getting to the stage we could do swifts, which would need devices that weighed no more than 1g."

"Icarus and the miniaturisation of telemetry means we are going to be able to monitor the natural world for the first time. We know hardly anything about bird migrations. We can now see that in evolutionary terms birds must know when it's a good time to migrate. We knew it was something like this but not at the individual level. This is answering questions and posing more," says Kasper Thorup, a bird migration researcher at Copenhagen university.

Being able to track birds, and eventually very small insects, is now seen as vital tool for conservation as well as a benefit for human health, which is increasingly linked to the movement of animals and people. About 70% of worldwide epidemics, like Sars, West Nile virus or bird flu, result from animal-human contact.

More knowledge about migrations is needed because populations of migratory birds like wood warblers, spotted fly-catchers and nightingales are declining fast, says the RSPB's Graham Madge. "Understanding the routes they take can help us preserve them and prevent higher than normal rates of infection among wildlife populations. We still don't know where they go and many are only here for a few months. Without knowing exactly where they go and when we can not understand how to conserve them."


"We are getting close to a full life cycle understanding of birds," says Watts. "We used to see birds at different places at different times, but we did not know they were the same ones. What we are seeing now for the first time is the way birds connect places. We are reducing the size of the world."
(Whew, had a job copying all that.)
Carmel a member of SHOW .. I hope you love birds too. Its economical. It saves going to heaven.
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Katinka

Post by Katinka »

Also "wow", macdoum...
Merci pur toi travails de traduction!
Unfortunately I just haven't got the time (and calmness in me) to keep sitting here and read and think about it more intensely.
But sooner or later I'll come back to your post.
P.S. You were a late bird last night?!
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macdoum
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Post by macdoum »

It will be a great advance is science of migration when this programme starts. :D



(I have removed the big portion of text as it is just a repetition of the first post) Felis
Carmel a member of SHOW .. I hope you love birds too. Its economical. It saves going to heaven.
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Post by Katinka »

Yesterday I could again watch a flock of cranes (est. number: 100), flying in a big mess above the valley. The usual voices to communicate that there is a thermal lift to take.
Afterwards they flew on heading South-West.
As in the meteo reported yesterday, cranes currently fly in this direction because more winter is arriving in Northern Germany.
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macdoum
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Post by macdoum »

Albatross is the oldest bird known to give birth

Her name is Wisdom she is 63 years old at least; :shake:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worl ... z2sjR088U5
Carmel a member of SHOW .. I hope you love birds too. Its economical. It saves going to heaven.
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Post by Katinka »

Another "burning" new post by Carsten Rohde on his black stork Blog.

For me, it's, amongst others, an appeal against sendering more BS for the sake of scientific research.

Carsten's way was/ is to understand the behaviour and character of the secret forest birds, and to follow them as nature permits.
Africa is far away, and we cannot change things there for the BS' welfare.
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Post by Manu »

I've just discovered.
Since years a single black-stork stays every winter in Switzerland (30km away from my hometown). He is here also this winter. It's very special, he is maybe the one and only.
http://www.gnvu.ch/Homepage_Neu/Aktuell ... 008_04.pdf
You have to scroll a bit down to see the report and the picture.
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macdoum
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Post by macdoum »

A Swiss study has shown that the Artic Swift stays aloft for 200 days in a row. :shock:
The report is explained here; http://phys.org/news/2013-10-alpine-swi ... -days.html

Incredible.
Carmel a member of SHOW .. I hope you love birds too. Its economical. It saves going to heaven.
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macdoum
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Post by macdoum »

This group of volonteers help reintroduce Whooping Cranes to E Amearica. Here's how;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCiB5QkfLx4#t=42

They do need help & support. :thumbs:
Carmel a member of SHOW .. I hope you love birds too. Its economical. It saves going to heaven.
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Liz01
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Post by Liz01 »

Bad News
In Rostock Zoo have been killed because of bird flu all the storks. Previously on a dead stork, the highly contagious virus H5N8 had been found as of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Agriculture Minister Till Backhaus (SPD) announced on Thursday in Schwerin. Two other storks are also died at the weekend, the remaining nine storks of the stock had been killed...

http://www.merkur-online.de/aktuelles/w ... 09640.html
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Post by Lizzzy »

The cranes are coming back! Last week more than 70000 cranes flew over France and arrived in the western part of Germany last weekend. I saw a flock of about 100 cranes flying north when I was outside in the garden. Spring is coming. :loveshower:
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Post by mogga »

Here is an interesting video about stork migration research:

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Post by Solo »

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Post by Liz01 »

Cyprus: Massacre on Migration 2018

The good news is bird trapping activity in the British Eastern Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus (ESBA) has declined in comparison with autumn 2017. There were 33 % less active trapping sites, CABS (Committee against Bird Slaughter) found less set traps and the number of set nets found had dropped by more than 63 % in just one year. This is due to new personnel in the SBA Police taking the issue of illegal bird killings seriously. In just one year they have managed to radically reduce the trapping levels. We were very impressed with the team’s work.
The situation in Republic of Cyprus hasn’t improved much. Despite the new, higher fines introduced last year, trapping in the Republic remains common and widespread.

We managed to film the main trapper in Cyprus during a night stake-out in a secret location overlooking their site. This is a large operation as can be seen in the video. This trapper was arrested previously after being reported by us and BirdLife Cyprus and he was fined €4000. However he is undeterred and has continued with the trapping.

http://www.chrispackham.co.uk/news/cypr ... ation-2018
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Post by Solo »

pleas help Hungarian storklovers
- too much young storklet perished in first days after they fly out of the nest and adult storks, raptors and also migrating birds are often victims. The numbers are very big - as a minimum, about 30 000 birds may be affected by an electric shock, medium 170 000, maximum 500 000 birds.

https://www.peticiok.com/az_eon_szigete ... I9QiOrWL88
on this page little down after the Hungaria text is this text also English, for signing click pls on the blue "Petíció aláírása" in menu right and confirm your signature in the mail as usual

thanx very much
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Post by Solo »

"Black and white Storks Available.... Anti Snakes....."
:shock: https://looduskalender.ee/forum/viewtop ... 96#p705296

:help: anyone else can help - report pls about this to your organisations and to Birdlife Nigeria: https://www.birdlife.org/africa/partner ... dation-ncf (info@ncfnigeria.org)
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Post by Brit »

I was just about to post this, Solo. Isn't it disgusting .....

Facebook - this Guy, : https://www.facebook.com/samailag1?__tn ... ww&fref=nf

is not only offering different puppies and gazeles, no, also „Black an white Storks Available … Anti Snakes ….“ Please look at his entry from December 10 2019,- with pictures! Makes me so sick!!!
Have a nice day!
Brit
http://www.worldofanimals.eu/
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Post by Brit »

before I wanted to post this, not 'only' about Storks, but also other migrating Birds:

How high can migrating birds fly? Most birds fly in the heigths of the highest building of the world, the Burj Kalifa, 830 m, but there are others too:

Northern Pintail – Spießente – 4000 m.

White stork – Weißstorch - 4800 m

Wall creeper – Mauerläufer
Hummingbird – Kolibri - 5500 m
Sprarrow – Sperling

Siberian crane – Sibirischer-/Schnee-/Nonnenkranich – 6000 m

Mallard duck – Mallard-Ente - 6500 m
Andean condor – Adenkondor

Bearded vulture – Bart-/Lämmergeier -7300 m

Steppe eagle - Steppenadler
Demoiselle Cranes – Jungfern-/Demoiselle Kranich - 7900 m

Alpine chough – Alpendohle – 8000 m

Whooper swan – Singschwan – 8200 m

Bar-headed goose – Streifen-/Indische Gans – 8800 m

Common crane – Kranich – 10 000 m

Rüppell’s vulture – Sperbergeier -11 300 m
Have a nice day!
Brit
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Post by Solo »

Brit wrote: January 9th, 2020, 4:14 pm is not only offering different puppies and gazeles, no, also „Black an white Storks Available … Anti Snakes ….“ Please look at his entry from December 10 2019,- with pictures! Makes me so sick!!!
:nod: I've read it last days :bow: :cry:

Brit, thanx for reaction and your work in "The Black Bear Cam" thread :2thumbsup:
:wave:
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Post by Solo »

Solo wrote: January 9th, 2020, 3:28 pm "Black and white Storks Available.... Anti Snakes....."
:shock: https://looduskalender.ee/forum/viewtop ... 96#p705296

:help: anyone else can help - report pls about this to your organisations and to Birdlife Nigeria: https://www.birdlife.org/africa/partner ... dation-ncf (info@ncfnigeria.org)
the answer to SOS .. group (see in comments - link above)
https://i.postimg.cc/hvz8N3PS/SOS-answer.jpg

more here: viewtopic.php?p=705372#p705372
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