Sonic’s awesome journey
Newsletter 13/09/2019
Sonic is a two-year old-old female Northern Bald Ibis; she belongs to the first generation of birds that were trained in Überlingen at Lake Constance in 2017 and were guided by ultralight aircrafts to the wintering area in Tuscany. In 2020, when these birds are sexually mature, they will return to Überlingen independently to breed.
Sonic already accomplished this journey in 2019 as a subadult bird. On June 5 she left Tuscany. Thanks to a GPS transmitter and the App Animal Tracker, we and numerous fans of hers were able to follow her flights towards north. Initially, Sonic followed a direct route towards Überlingen, passing Lago di Iseo and arriving at the foothills of the Alps. However, when approaching the Ortler massif at 2,229 m above sea level, she turned around and followed a new route further west. She flew to Lake Como and from there to the northern foothills of the Swiss Alps.
From then on, she explored the region from the Rhine Valley to Geneva and stayed in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and France. Twice she visited her future breeding area near Überlingen at Lake Constance, but she didn’t stay for long. During her flights, Sonic also stopped over at several former NBI breeding areas in Switzerland, especially in the Rhine Valley between Chur and Sargans.
In early September, Sonic again visited her future breeding area, but then quickly few back south and crossed the Alps, the Po Valley and the Apennines in just a few days, arriving near Pisa, which is located only 50 km from the wintering area WWF Oasi Laguna di Orbetello. Her journey took a good three months. Sonic covered 3,300 km and visited five countries.
In 2011, the subadult female Goja made NBI history in our project, being the first bird to cross the Alps and reach the breeding area Burghausen in Bavaria at the end of July. In the following year, she returned with other conspecifics, bred for the first time and led - as the first NBI - her offspring to the wintering area. Since then, an increasing number of NBIs have migrated along this north-eastern corridor; they all breed in Burghausen or Kuchl and guide their offspring back to the wintering area in autumn. In 2019, 37 (!) juvenile NBIs fledged in those two breeding areas. Currently, more than 50 birds are in Salzburg; soon they will cross the Alps to fly to southern Tuscany.
Sonic is the next bird to make NBI history in the context of the European LIFE+ reintroduction project. She’s opened up a second, western migration corridor and is the first NBI to return to the breeding area near Überlingen at Lake Constance after more than 400 years of the species’ absence. We hope that she’ll fly back to Überlingen as a sexually mature bird in 2020 to become the founder of a new NBI breeding colony.
Chart: Sonic's flight pattern is characteristic for subadult birds. In contrast to sexually mature birds, which usually migrate along a more in a direct flyway (e.g. Peter along the eastern migration corridor), subadult birds like Sonic explore a wider area. However, Sonic showed a much more direct flyway on her way back to Tuscany.
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