Final stage of flight training
Newsletter 05/07/2019
This year we are training an excellent group of 31 young Northern Bald Ibises in Heiligenberg at Lake Constance. The birds are already reliably following the ultralight aircraft.
Yesterday’s training flight led us from Heiligenberg to Überlingen, where we followed the shoreline of Lake Constance with its molasse cliffs, where the birds are meant to breed in the upcoming years. Overall, it was a relaxed and smooth flight over 40 km, both for the birds and the flight team. The highlight was the encounter with a zeppelin above Lake Constance.
The birds are occasionally showing a flight formation; they also prefer to use the thermals to gain altitude. These are important prerequisites for the human-led migration, which is expected to start on August 14th or 15th. From August 5th we’re going to train with two aircrafts. Thus, the two foster mothers Anne-Gabriela Schmalstieg and Helena Wehner are able to accompany their birds together, which increases the motivation of both the birds and the foster mothers even more.
This year, too, the international media is considerably interested in our project. For weeks, almost every flight training has been accompanied by camera crews. It’s quite remarkable that the productions are increasingly concerning other formats than topic-related documentaries. For example, a Finnish media-art team as well as a German-Canadian team were on site, the latter using 360° cameras to develop and implement various new media techniques differing from “classic” television.
The project team is also visiting TV shows. Last year, Anne-Gabriela Schmalstieg and Johannes Fritz were guests of the RTL Show SternTV. This year, on August 7th (11:30 pm), Johannes Fritz will be at the Markus Lanz Show, one of the most popular German talk shows.
This media presence gives us the opportunity not only to present our LIFE project and the Northern Bald Ibis, but also to sensitize the general public to more general issues of biodiversity and to implement campaigns of overall importance, such as illegal bird hunting in southern European countries or electrocution on unsecured power poles, a mortality cause in large birds in Europe that is still receiving too little attention.
Picture (Waldrappteam): The Northern Bald Ibis is increasingly becoming a media star. On Wednesday, August 7 (11:30 pm), our project will be presented at the ZDF show Markus Lanz.
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