Rescuing storks by educating Africans

Migratory birds, such as the white stork, have played an important role in the work of the ICBP since its foundation in 1922 (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987; Boardman Reference Boardman1981, 160). Alarmed by declining white stork population numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, the ICBP, together with the German branch of the WWF, initiated several projects that focused on the white stork’s stay in Africa during the European winter.Footnote ² In 1981, the ICBP created the Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill Specialist Group (SIS-SG) to coordinate data gathering and understand the status and need for protection of these birds internationally (ICBP 1983). The SIS-SG was founded at a meeting at the German bird park Walsrode in West Germany. Walsrode, at the time the world’s largest bird park, was owned by Wolf W. Brehm, an important funder of research, protection and breeding programs of birds, whose Fund for International Bird Conservation began financing the SIS-SG’s activities in 1982 (Luthin Reference Luthin1986).

The connection to Germany was not coincidental. Since the early twentieth century, German ornithologists had been leading in migratory bird research, with a strong focus on the white stork (De Bont Reference Bont2010). In many ways, the white stork had become a mascot for German ornithologists, amateurs and professionals alike. In May 1983, just prior to the fifth international white stork census, the DBV organized a symposium in Baden-Württemberg in Southwest Germany, on the “threatening decline” of the white stork, the heraldic animal of the organization. According to the conference organizer, Jochen Hölzinger, the 76 percent decline in the number of breeding pairs in West Germany since 1934 could be explained by looking at the changes in the birds’ habitat. Since the Second World War, white storks had been victims of changing landscapes in their European breeding areas and, more recently, of landscape development in their wintering areas in newly independent African states, which lay outside of the scope of most European conventions. It was in Africa, Hölzinger explained, that chemicals and pesticides, promoted by local governments and international development agencies, paired with an ignorance of conservation principles, affected the birds directly or indirectly through the eradication of the insects on which they fed (Hölzinger Reference Hölzinger and Hölzinger1986, 7, 14).

In 1983, the ICBP, together with the International Waterfowl Research Bureau, launched a survey of habitat requirements within the Palearctic-African flyway system, the migratory trajectory annually followed by the European white stork. The concept of the flyway had emerged in the United Sates during the 1920s, in the context of the United States Biological Survey, as a way to connect and protect wetlands thought to be crucial for the protection of migratory waterfowl (Wilson Reference Wilson2010, 27–28). Rather than connecting habitats along the migratory route, however, the ICBP survey strongly focused on the storks’ wintering grounds on the African continent.

In the years 1984, 1985, and 1986, the questionnaire was distributed widely through the ICBP’s and the WWF’s networks in both Europe and Africa. The English and French questionnaire was sent to about 300 ornithologists, most of whom were white researchers “of European descent, or Europeans who know Africa,” asking them for their input on thirty-nine African countries (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987, 1–2; 7–9). The survey focused primarily on land changes caused by resource extraction, agricultural intensification, pesticide use, and industrial infrastructure, such as dams or electric wiring, that were being rapidly developed in many parts of post-independent Africa (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987, 3–4). Geographically, the questionnaire focused particularly on Sahelian Africa, defined as the region between 27°50’N and 30°50’S, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987, 62). Mali and Sudan in particular were identified by respondents as important stopovers and wintering sites for migratory stork populations on the eastern and western routes, due to seasonal flooding and river deltas, which provided the water birds with sustenance in the form of fish and insects (Roux Reference Roux1990). Since the 1970s, both areas had been subject to unparalleled agricultural intensification, bolstered by foreign investment and technological aid by international organizations (O’Brien Reference O’Brien1981). According to the ICBP, the consequences of reckless development had been excessive pesticide use, and, in the case of Sudan, where, compared to Mali, local standards of living had improved only minimally, increased bird hunting by local farmers (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987, 79–80, 95–97).

The survey was not the only ongoing project proposing that a focus on Africa was crucial for European white stork conservation efforts. In the 1980s, the focus on Africa was seemingly reconfirmed by advances in data analysis, which allowed a new evaluation of historical ring finds. From the early twentieth century onwards, the territoriality of the stork had been a question of scientific interest for ornithologists in the European centers of bird banding. By the 1920s, stork banding had become a popular pastime among European amateur ornithologists, yet with little transregional or transnational synchronization (Schüz 1930; Reference Schüz1938b; von Lucanus Reference von Lucanus1919; De Bont Reference Bont2010). The standardization of ring records began in the 1970s, when the European Union for Bird Ringing (EURING) established a European databank for ring data.

In 1977, an attempt was made at computerizing historical data going back to the 1920s. In 1982, these efforts were advanced with additional funding by the European Community (du Feu et al. Reference du Feu, Clark, Schaub, Fiedler and Baillie2016). The synchronized data, and the evaluation and analysis of more than 10,000 white stork ring recoveries that had been collected in the framework of the EURING project, including new rings returned between 1963 and 1983, seemed to show that almost three quarters of the white storks ringed in France and recaptured in French West Africa had been shot or trapped (Thauront Reference Thauront1986, 10). These findings seemed to reconfirm that European white storks were mainly threatened during their stay on the African continent.

The new ring data was also used to underpin theoretical reflections and additional research into the hypothesis that nutritional shortcomings in Africa were at the core of the European stork problem. In 1985, a second Walsrode symposium on international stork conservation, convened jointly by the ICBP and the WWF, discussed the work of two Dutch ornithologists, Hans Dallinga and Martin Schoenmakers, which suggested exactly this (Rheinwald, Ogden, and Schulz Reference Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989, 229; Dallinga and Schoenmakers Reference Dallinga and Schoenmakers1984). According to the two ornithologists, it was unlikely that breeding conditions in Europe were the cause of the decline in population numbers. If that were the case, they argued, there would have been no difference between the populations of eastern and western storks in places where breeding areas overlapped (Dallinga and Schoenmakers Reference Dallinga and Schoenmakers1987; Reference Dallinga, Schoenmakers, Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989, 237). However, the western population had declined more rapidly, and reasons therefore needed to be sought in the distinct wintering areas of the two populations. According to Dallinga and Schoenmakers, fluctuations in plague intensity—the availability of locusts and other insects—in wintering areas of the eastern white stork population, located in East and South Africa, corresponded clearly with fluctuations of stork numbers in the breeding grounds of eastward-migrating birds in Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg. Similar correlations could be found for the western stork population, breeding, for instance in Southwest Germany (Dallinga and Schoenmakers Reference Dallinga, Schoenmakers, Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989, 239–43). Hence, for Dallinga and Schoenmakers it was “obvious that we must look first to Africa for the main causes, in view of the large influence of conditions in the wintering areas on the annual fluctuations in numbers” (Dallinga and Schoenmakers Reference Dallinga, Schoenmakers, Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989, 250). Similar conclusions were drawn at the Walsrode symposium.

It would be wrong however, to assume that the focus on Africa resulted chiefly from newly analyzed ring data from the 1970s and 1980s. This becomes clear when looking at the ways in which new findings simply revived a representation of the European white stork that had been present in leading ornithological circles in Europe at least since the decline of the population had first been noticed. This representation was not born in the 1980s, but merely gained new significance in the context of European conservationists’ criticism of rash and presumably ecologically unsound development in the global South.

The origins for this place-based problem definition can be found in a long tradition of European centers for ornithology and their difficulties in connecting to the peripheries of their networks, which after all, accommodated the birds half of the year. From the beginning, banding efforts were firmly rooted in Europe. Although largely based on amateur participation, ornithology had, for a long time, been linked to the prestige of European scientific communities, with fewer links to colonial Africa. This was perhaps most visible in Germany, where, by 1932, the network of licensed ringers counted more than 50,000 members.Footnote ³ In these ornithological networks, Africa had long been a “dark continent” (Schüz Reference Schüz1948). From the limited correspondence with a handful South African birders, not much was known about the wintering areas’ role in the healthy return of the European white stork.

From the 1950s onwards, with the postwar revival of ornithological affairs and the first registered declines in population numbers, the lack of knowledge about the storks’ condition during the European winter became a topic of concern. This concern was reinforced by stories about local hunting traditions and the sighting of “arrow storks,”Footnote ⁴ which, since the nineteenth century, not only seemed to provide evidence for the location of the storks’ wintering areas, but also encouraged ideas about African hunting as a major threat for the winged European travelers (Schüz Reference Schüz1948; Jacob Reference Jacobs, Beattie, Melillp and O’Gorman2015).

Hunting was one explanation for the storks’ decline; low quality nutrition was another. In the 1950s, Ernst Schüz, the former director of the Rossitten observatory, suggested that “disturbance years,” years with lower counts of breeding pairs, could stem from parasites in locusts, consumed by the birds during their winter stays (Schüz Reference Schüz1959). Other causes about which Schüz speculated were shooting for pleasure and locust poisoning, two problems similarly linked to the birds’ African winter range (Schüz and Szijj Reference Schüz and Szijj1961; Schüz Reference Schüz1948, 15–16). Like Dallinga’s and Schoenmakers’s conclusion from the 1980s, Schüz’s 1959 analysis posited that solutions “to the decrease in numbers in many places must be sought in African parks.” In his case, however, he based his conclusion on the argument that, in Europe, the birds were protected from harmful activities by “the Christian and Mohammedan religion” (Schüz Reference Schüz1959, 338–39).

Stork research in the first half of the twentieth century was not limited to European ornithologists. A handful Africa-based ornithologists, though few in number and predominantly linked to white, colonial networks, tried to counter the accusations by birders based on the European continent. In fact, since the 1940s, a number of South African ornithologists have researched storks’ digestion of invested or poisoned locusts to prove that their ingestion had no negative health effects (e.g., Milstein Reference Milstein1966; Jacobs Reference Jacobs2016, 116–18). Up to 1970, the former British colonial officer and ornithologist Reginald Moreau maintained that human land changes had not been detrimental to Palearctic migrants, and that some migratory bird species, adapted to human land changes, might even have benefitted from them (Moreau Reference Moreau1970, 95–103). However, the concerns by Europe-based ornithologists about the African condition remained.

These concerns were not limited to German birders. In 1966, the well-known British ornithologist David Lack, after examining stork data from Oldenburg in northern Germany, suggested that main factors causing the decline in European stork populations should be sought in Africa. Lack could not detect any noticeable difference in the numbers of young annually produced per breeding pair during the previous thirty-one years of data. Mortality, he concluded, occurred either in young birds, in adults, or in both, and “this almost certainly means that the critical mortality occurs in the [European] winter in Africa” (Lack Reference Lack1966, 228). At the very least, Lack proposed, “these findings suggest that one should seek first in Africa for the factors causing the current overall decrease in the numbers of the White Stork in Europe” (ibid.).

In the 1980s, the synthesized banding data, and climatic changes in the Sahel region especially, seemed to reconfirm these older representations of European birds as victims of a generalized African state of affairs. In the autumn and winter of 1986 and 1987, Holger Schulz, a German ornithologist, conducted field research on white storks wintering in Africa for the WWF. Schulz had been the chairman of the ICBP/IUCN world working group on bustards, and had spent several months in Africa on a project for the United Nations’ German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), working on “pest bird control.”Footnote ⁵ In 1986, he was asked by the WWF to instead study the effects of insect pest control on birds.

Schulz visited South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Kenia, Tanzania and Sudan, where he worked with Wilhelm Kühle from the WWF Germany and the Sudanese conservationist Ahmed Elmalik, whose work Schulz knew from the 1985 Walsrode symposium. During the expeditions, Schulz and his colleagues observed the behavior of white storks with binocular telescopes. In Sudan, Schulz, Kühle and Emalik also interviewed twenty-three herders and farmers. Farmers who had hunted storks were interviewed independently to obtain information on their methods. In addition, the team collected samples of tissue of dead storks to test for the presence of pesticides (Elmalik Reference Elmalik, Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989).Footnote ⁶

Reporting on the results, Schulz reconfirmed that threat factors in Africa, including hunting, droughts, and pesticide use, had a significant effect on regional stork populations. In particular, Schulz explained, hunting threatened storks resting in the West African Niger delta, where only a few hundred western storks remained each year. On the eastern route, hunting was a problem in Lebanon, Syria and Sudan. In Sudan, farmers and herders caught resting storks with “primitive means” such as boomerangs, canes, stones, and snares.Footnote ⁷ While bird conservationists and ornithologists condemned the hunting of migratory birds within Europe as well (e.g., Greer Reference Greer2020), here, concerns about hunting became part of a larger campaign to highlight the need for European ecological expertise on the African continent post-independence. Schulz stressed, for instance, that in Sudan hunting had only emerged with the intensification of state sponsored sorghum agriculture from the 1960s onwards.Footnote ⁸ Due to changes in the climate, noted Schulz, the storks’ risky migration across Sahara and Sahel was becoming longer, while the availability of locusts became less certain. This explained why the western population was affected more strongly on average, as eastern storks could usually follow the annual rain fronts further south. Yet, Sudanese farmers, too, reported having seen hundreds of dead storks near seared water holes during drought years. A third factor which played into the decline of the western population was the control of locusts in West Africa, which had increased since the 1970s, reducing an important food source for white storks. Schulz’s expedition to the Sahel regions showed that eastern storks were affected by similar developments (Schulz Reference Schulz1989b, 12–13). Schulz’s project thus reconfirmed that hunting, drought, and pesticide use were the biggest problems for wintering storks in Africa.

The WWF and ICBP projects tied in with a larger discourse that promoted the responsibility of conservation NGOs in Africa based on a long tradition of European expertise and moral authority in matters of international conservation (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987). By referring to the work by Schüz and his contemporaries, ornithologists in the WWF and the ICBP placed themselves directly in this tradition. As it had in earlier projects, the focus on Africa served to highlight European competences. At the same time, creating images of storks as victims of African land development, in the context of 1980s development projects, stressed this need for European competences once more. In many ways, the focus on Africa, and other parts of what was considered the developing world, was part of a trend within international NGOs concerned with environmental protection, such as the WWF, which steadily increased their presence in the global South during the 1980s (Brockington and Scholfield Reference Brockington and Scholfield2010, 554).

The text of the Bern Convention of 1986 also strongly emphasized the integration of some African countries into the convention to protect European natural heritage abroad, which was celebrated by many European conservationists. For this, representations of the bird were used by ornithologists in their boundary work, their rhetorical style, to stress the need for the continued involvement of European experts. While the white stork had previously been protected as a close cohabitor of human landscapes, Hölzinger explained, the onset of modernized agriculture changed the ways in which the birds could live harmoniously with humans (Hölzinger Reference Hölzinger and Hölzinger1986, 7, 14). According to Hölzinger, not only storks, but also human landscapes, to which the stork had adapted, were being poisoned. The decline of the white stork seemed to represent the estrangement of people from their environment and their non-human cohabitants. The stork, in this regard, was both an indicator and a victim of this unhealthy process. This was captured on the ICBP poster in the form of an invasion of vermin following the killing of the birds, whose usefulness the hunter seemed to have forgotten (Rheinwald, Ogden, and Schulz Reference Rheinwald, Ogden and Schulz1989, 9). This representation too, however, predated the 1980s.

Already during the 1950s, in line with pessimist environmental visions of the postwar period, ornithologists like Schüz, to whom the 1985 Walsrode symposium was dedicated, had presented modern technology and growing discrepancies between human societies and nature as one of the main reasons for animal extinctions (Lorenz Reference Lorenz1950; Schüz Reference Schüz1953). Schüz promoted the idea that the decline and, in some places, the local extinction of wildlife on the African continent could only be stopped with far reaching educational campaigns (Schüz Reference Schüz1953). During an Africa trip to the Second Pan-African Ornithological Congress in 1964, Schüz continued to campaign for more educational work in Africa.Footnote ⁹

The language used by Schüz and his contemporaries is very similar to that found in published material from the 1980s projects. In a report on his work in the WWF project for the Austrian journal Vogelschutz in Österreich in 1989, Schulz explained that while in the European breeding areas, the recreation of nature areas was important for the recovery of the population, in Africa, educational work was required to convey to the human population the biology, usefulness and thus protection-worthiness of white storks (Schulz Reference Schulz1989a). The rhetoric in Schulz’s report closely recalls that used in the early twentieth century in Europe to convince farmers of the usefulness of certain bird species (Nowak Reference Nowak and Blab2005, 33–48).

The educational campaigns of the 1980s focused on designing information posters and leaflets. The ornithologist Gerhard Nikolaus, who, together with his wife, had been working almost continuously in Sudan between 1976 and 1984, designed a poster for the ICBP that was distributed, with the help of the Wildlife Conservation Forces Central Administration in Khartoum, after a Sudanese wildlife protection seminar in March 1985 (Heckenroth Reference Heckenroth and Hölzinger1986; Nikolaus Reference Nikolaus1987). Earlier in the 1980s, an educational campaign by the French branch of the ICBP was aimed at protecting the white stork in West Africa. In 1986, 15,000 French posters, leaflets and cartoons were sent to contacts in Mali, and 2,000 Arabic ones to contacts in Tunisia, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Niger, the Republic of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Mauritania, in order to contribute to the protection of European, in this case French, national heritage (Terrasse Reference Terrasse and Hölzinger1986, 343). The underlying assumption conveyed by the posters, and the educational material (such as cartoons) that was distributed in leaflets, was clear. While African support seemed crucial to saving the European white stork, African conservation hotspots were in need of support by European conservationists to do so.

Overall, then, the projects that emerged in the 1980s to tackle the decline of the European white stork in Africa revived older representations of the white stork as a victim of African ignorance, and of European conservationists as invaluable experts. The estrangement of the African rural population from their ecological condition, this rhetoric argued, required the intervention of European bird experts and educational campaigns. This place-based problem entailed a clear representation of the role of the scientists and researchers involved in stork research and conservation as being able to restore disturbed African ecological relationships. The superiority of European expertise was highlighted by the suggested need for educational campaigns against rural hunting and the need for additional cooperation of European bird experts with international development NGOs present in Africa, which in part financed the use of pesticides and agricultural transformations.

Bridging Middle Eastern fault lines with migration ecology

In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, a change in the approach to stork conservation emerged, accompanied by a noticeable change in rhetoric. Again, German scientists, this time researchers at the MPI ornithological station in the German town of Radolfzell, took the lead. The geographical focus of the MPI projects was, however, not centered on African wintering areas, but on bottlenecks of migration, nodes through which the majority of migratory birds passed on their annual roundtrip. Such bottlenecks were deemed significant for studying migration ecology, including the birds’ requirements for resting and feeding, but also for research on physiological and behavioral questions related to the birds’ orientation and navigation.

In light of their significance, bottlenecks became important sites for observation and experimentation. One such site is the Kurish Spit, a Baltic salient, which became the location of the Rossitten observatory (De Bont Reference Bont2015). Another particularly important bottleneck for the eastern population was located in the Middle East, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, allowing migratory birds, such as the white stork, to access the African continent over land rather than water.

The MPI ornithologists’ decision to focus their attention on migration pathways and en route stopovers rather than on wintering areas was based, in part, on newly available tracking technology, this time satellite telemetry, which allowed for the continuous tracing of individual birds. At the same time, however, the choice was also motivated by a wish to revive fundamental research into migration ecology and older visions of international scientific prestige. Envisioned research cooperation crossed the political barriers of the time, including the lifting iron curtain and the fault lines in the Middle East (Müller and Nowak Reference Müller and Nowak1992).Footnote ¹⁰ In this approach, representations of storks as true internationally migrating birds, interlinking continents and bridging political divides, were used to bolster the image of science-based conservation as a means of international rapprochement.

Members at the MPI in Radolfzell, led by Peter Berthold, at the time the institute’s director, lobbied for the white stork’s integration as a case study in the framework of the CMS, in hopes of gaining financial support for an international project to study and protect the birds along their migration route.Footnote ¹¹ From the beginning, the MPI’s proposals focused on migration ecology, resulting in a focus on the eastern population, in which the migration instinct was considered to be still intact. Breeding and reintroduction programs, focusing mainly on the western population, for instance in Switzerland, seemed to be interfering with the storks’ migratory habits, which were essential to the scientific endeavors of the MPI ornithologists.Footnote ¹² The last 20,000 pairs of the western population were seen as interspersed with semi-domesticated, non-migratory, bred storks, which meant the end of “the natural population.”Footnote ¹³ This representation of storks put their long-distance migration center stage.

In a lucky turn, the German reunification allowed for a new cooperation with the ornithological station Loburg, which had been founded in 1979 in Brandenburg, East Germany, as a white stork rescue center.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, MPI researchers sought additional international cooperation that could give access to crucial migration bottlenecks. From the late 1980s onwards, the MPI established links with Israeli researchers. Israel was uniquely located “at the junction of three continents—Europe, Asia and Africa,” with “450,000 storks flying the country each spring,” and “in autumn about half this number.”Footnote ¹⁵ In 1989, Yossi Leshem, an Israeli PhD candidate at the University of Tel Aviv, reached out to Eugeniusz Nowak from the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) in Bonn. Nowak, an ornithologist with Polish roots, was one of the negotiators of the CMS, and a key contact for Berthold in German conservation politics.Footnote ¹⁶ Leshem’s work was concerned with bird-airplane collisions, financed with military money to save human lives, but in the coming years the Israeli military would finance studies on stork migration and coalition warning systems between Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan (Leshem Reference Leshem and Schulz1999, 550–51). While Nowak facilitated cooperation with the Eastern European countries through which the eastern population passed, the new cooperation with Israel soon became an important branch and flagship project in Radolfzell stork research.

According to Berthold, Nowak, and Leshem, the conservation of migratory birds required new research into questions that bird banding was unable to answer (Nowak and Berthold Reference Nowak and Berthold1987).Footnote ¹⁷ Stork conservation efforts connected to the WWF/ICBP projects were based on ring data. This meant the research focused on places of aggregation where many rings had been found, although it was known that migrants did not stay in any one place for long. Often, fieldwork based on ring data had focused on wetlands, where congregates of ducks and other water birds tended to gather for some period of time (Grimmet Reference Grimmet1987, 8). According to a growing number of bird ecologists, this was a faulty approach, as it revealed little about the actual routes that birds took and the feeding places that were most relevant for their energy budget, crucial especially for long-distance migrants, such as the white stork.

For both MPI researchers and their partners in Israel, satellite telemetry held the promise of overcoming these known biases in ring data. Telemetry, tracking birds with electronic senders attached to their backs in real time and by satellite, it was hoped, would help to identify important resting spots along the birds’ migratory routes, enabling more ecological research into the ground conditions of migratory stork trajectories in ways that ring finds, always dependent on the presence of willing human collectors, could not. Telemetry would make it possible to test whether areas believed to be important for white storks in Europe, Africa, and along the way, were as important as had been assumed.Footnote ¹⁸ Stork telemetry, Berthold suggested, could serve as a pilot project to underline the CMS’s interest in science-based conservation efforts across national borders. In these efforts, he envisioned the MPI to play a leading role.

Telemetry had emerged in wildlife management in the 1970s. However, early transmitters were bulky, heavy devices, and their use was confined to larger animal species, such as caribous and bears in North American national parks (Benson Reference Benson2010, Reference Benson2016). In 1984 and 1985, scientists at John Hopkins University conducted the first successful experiments with birds using two TIROS-N satellites and an Argos data recording system, with transmitters of about 200g (Benson Reference Benson2012). Research with Argos mini transmitters on birds was also conducted by Monty Priede at the University of Aberdeen. However, before long-distance migrants such as storks could be tracked, lighter transmitters with longer battery lives had to be developed. In the late 1980s, the MPI contacted the Technical University (TU) in Berlin to develop transmitters of 100g with solar recharging. At the same time, plans were made for ethological experiments with storks with dummy transmitters, to see whether the extra load would affect their behavior.Footnote ¹⁹ At the time, the TU Berlin was building a research satellite, TUBSAT1, which was to be launched into space in the summer of 1988. The project was delayed, however, after the Challenger disaster of 1986. The project was eventually rescheduled for the launch of the Second German Spacelab Mission, D-2, in April 1993.Footnote ²⁰ In the meantime, the first German-Israeli telemetry studies commenced in Israel, following tracked birds by airplane.

In March 1990, four wild white storks were caught, equipped with transmitters and released.Footnote ²¹ In 1991 and 1992, stork tracking experiments were conducted with birds caught in former East Germany, migrating via the Middle East to their wintering areas in Uganda, followed by plane and truck. It was hoped that, in a few years, the processes of migration would be known for smaller populations in much more detail than banding had ever allowed.Footnote ²² By the mid-1990s, regular telemetry studies by satellite had finally commenced. For the first time, whole migration cycles could be tracked.Footnote ²³ In each of the years 1994, 1995, and 1996, between ten and fifteen white storks were fitted with Argos senders that transmitted several locations per day. By now, the project was officially linked to the CMS.

The telemetry approach challenged several assumptions on which bird conservation as pursued by the WWF and ICBP projects had been built. Wouter Van den Bossche, a PhD candidate, supervised by Berthold in Radolfzell and working with Leshem in Tel Aviv, found that, contrary to previous beliefs, storks spent only short periods of time in one location during their winter migration. The data also revealed significant differences between individual birds, which further problematized the approach—based on banding data—to focus on sites with the most ring finds.Footnote ²⁴ A tracked autumn migration in the fall of 1995, moreover, refuted that east and west storks returned home on similar routes to their outward migration, which complicated the notion of a single Palearctic-African flyway (Schulz Reference Schulz and Schulz1999; Schulz Reference Schulz1989b, 15). While storks on the outward migration rested only shortly and required only little food intake, they used every opportunity to feed on the inward migration from Africa to Israel. It was, moreover, unclear why most storks migrated back extremely famished when passing through Israel.

If the birds lacked protein, which would have had an effect on their breeding successes, and to some degree could explain declining numbers in Europe, this problem could not be solved by focusing on the availability of food in wintering areas alone, for instance by preventing the use of pesticides to eradicate locusts. Telemetry findings questioned the centrality of the need for refuges in the African wintering areas. They instead highlighted the necessity of paying attention to the “stepping stones” that the birds used to fill up their fat and protein reserves on the way to their breeding areas, requiring additional international and transregional cooperation with both Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries (Berthold et al. Reference Berthold, Bossche, Fiedler, Kaatz, Kaatz, Leshem, Nowak and Querner2001).Footnote ²⁵

Based on these early findings, the German-Israeli project was extended into the early 2000s, to create a targeted conservation policy for the eastern stork population during their migration to their winter territories and back. The renewed project tracked between ten and fifteen white storks every year, using solar transmitters built by the company Microwave Inc. The localization of the birds on the migration out and in occurred at least once per day, via three satellites with a direct modem connection to the institute in Radolfzell, and via cars and light airplanes fitted with antennas in the larger Mediterranean region. Using bird aviaries in Radolfzell and at the stork station Loburg, the weight and fat reserves of wild, captured storks were measured during migration periods with the help of MRI scans. Blood tests were conducted to measure protein reserves. These measurements from captured birds were compared to data obtained from migrating birds tested in Israel during the outward and inward flights, and from birds that had returned safely to their breeding area.Footnote ²⁶

This research suggested that storks migrated to Sudan within two weeks, without longer breaks to feed. They stopped only briefly in Turkey and Israel, where there was a need for undisturbed resting spots, but not necessarily feeding areas.Footnote ²⁷ On their way back to Europe, wild storks of the eastern population required many stopovers in Northern Africa, especially Egypt, in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean region. It was in these places that wetlands needed protection, while the role of Africa in filling up the birds’ protein storage was considered less significant (Berthold et al. Reference Berthold, Willem Van den Bossche, Kaatz, Kaatz and Querner2002; Van den Bossche et al. Reference Van den Bossche, Berthold, Kaatz, Nowak and Querner2002, 166–73). Moreover, the data collected from tagged storks did not suggest a specific problem of hunting in Africa. Instead, most casualties, the data suggested, occurred in Europe and the Middle East (Berthold et al. Reference Berthold, Willem Van den Bossche, Kaatz, Kaatz and Querner2002; Van den Bossche et al. Reference Van den Bossche, Berthold, Kaatz, Nowak and Querner2002, 166–73). This, of course, was a very different approach compared to the one followed by the earlier WWF-ICBP projects, resulting in partly contradictory findings.

Despite the new results provided by the telemetry data, it would be wrong to suggest that the differences in approach can be explained by the use of technology alone. Again, looking at representations of storks allows us to understand the long-term ambitions underlying the turn to telemetry. Some of the tagged birds received celebrity status. A female white stork called Prinzesschen, hatched at the Loburg station, was tracked for five full return cycles. In the 1990s and 2000s, Prinzesschen was followed by German television reporters, while her location could be tracked online by everyone with a computer and internet access. After her death in South Africa in the early 2000s, Prinzesschen was immortalized on a stamp, and in the form of a sculpture that has decorated the courtyard of the stork station in Loburg since 2010 (Berthold and Querner Reference Berthold and Querner2002).

Unlike the storks portrayed in the 1950s campaigns, “celebrity” storks like Prinzesschen, Peterchen, or Caesar were not presented as victims of an ecologically unsound progress. Instead, they were international voyagers, heralds for intercultural communication, scientific internationalism, and pioneers of tracking technologies. Yet, birds like Prinzesschen were more than mascots for telemetry. In many ways, the storks’ representation as diplomats, improving international understanding, mirrored the MPI scientists’ self-understanding, a self-image that predated the arrival of telemetry by several decades.

German ornithologists at the station in Rossitten were already internationally connected to birders, in other European countries and beyond, by the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the networks of birders and ringers were so extensive, that it was felt necessary to inscribe German bird rings in English and Arabic, to facilitate the international exchange of recapturing reports (Schüz Reference Schüz1934; Hornberger Reference Hornberger1943). International cooperation was not limited to networks of amateur observers. In the late 1930s, just prior to the Second World War, German ornithologists participated in white stork translocation experiments, working with British and Swiss stork experts to understand the birds’ strategies for orientation and the processes of their migration (Schüz Reference Schüz1938a).

Rossitten, operating as a member of the German Ornithological Society, had been part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society since 1923, and as such was concerned with both research into bird behavior and migration and the protection of birds (De Bont Reference Bont2010). The white stork played a dominant role in this prestigious program. The scientific interest of Rossitten’s ornithologists in the species increased in the course of the 1930s, when local numbers of breeding pairs grew to 750 couples and sixty-two nests per 100km², justifying a stork research project that involved the capture, banding, and release of local birds (Hornberger Reference Hornberger1943). Next to more descriptive endeavors, such as annual censuses and the mapping of migratory routes, ornithologists at Rossitten studied migration as an ecological phenomenon, researching, for instance, the ecological aspects of habitat choice, including ground and soil conditions, and quickly gaining international recognition for their work (Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg Reference Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg1936).

In the 1940s, Rossitten ornithologists were connected to German speaking stork researchers and volunteers through a wide network of observers, and were recognized abroad as international leaders in bird migration and behavior research. During the war, ornithologists like Schüz maintained links with other internationally known, German-speaking biologists, such as Konrad Lorenz, who in the 1940s led German efforts in behavioral biology (Schüz Reference Schüz1942, Reference Schüz1949). Even shortly after the war, Rossitten’s ecological research was praised by internationally renowned scholars, such as Ernst Mayr at Harvard University.Footnote ²⁸

In the mid-1950s, when corresponding with one of his frequent ringers, Schüz stressed the international character of all stork research, noting that, “one has to demonstrate that political borders are unfounded in such questions.Footnote ²⁹ However, in the postwar period, the German leadership in ecologically grounded ornithology and international migration research was lost, when territorial changes within Europe led to a shift in the German ornithological landscape and organization. The Rossitten observatory, located in East Prussia, was abandoned in 1945. A new station was quickly founded at Schloss Möggingen, Radolfzell, close to Lake Constance. In 1949, the station in Radolfzell became part of the newly founded Max Planck Society. Yet, with insufficient funds and staff, ecological research at this makeshift station did not proceed easily.Footnote ³⁰

While German ornithologists lost their leading position in the field, orientation research, which had previously been conducted with wild, migratory birds, such as the white stork, shifted into smaller scale laboratory settings. The orientation instinct, unlike long-distance migration strategies, was studied with homing birds, such as pigeons, which were easier to breed and train (Yeagley and Whitmore Reference Yeagley and Whitmore1947). Both the stork and the station had thus lost their dominant position in fundamental orientation research.

Radolfzell ornithologists were aware of the loss. In 1955, Schüz explained that if the institute had so far not conducted more experiments for orientation and physiological research, it was because of a lack of birds, rooms, and employees, and because others had taken over leading positions in research topics such as orientation.Footnote ³¹

In the late 1950s, much was still unknown about the exact migratory routes of storks, for instance, their main migration routes down the Nile, where no direct observation had ever been recorded (Schüz Reference Schüz1959). Attempts to follow migratory birds by aircraft had been unsuccessful (Dorst and Schüz Reference Dorst and Schüz1948). In the second half of the 1950s, a new director, Gustav Kramer, who in the late 1940s had experimented with sun orientation in wild birds, was supposed to boost the station’s international image. However, Kramer unexpectedly died in 1959. Next, the Dutch behavioralist Niko Tinbergen, at the time already working at the University of Oxford, was offered the position, but declined. During the 1960s, Lorenz, located in Seewiesen, close to Munich, took over as interim director. Lorenz pushed for more fundamental research on bird behavior, yet with 220 km between Seewiesen and Radolfzell, Lorenz only traveled to Radolfzell on rare occasions.Footnote ³²

In the early 1970s, Hans Löhrl was appointed director of the institute, and immediately concerned himself with strengthening its research profile. At the time, birding was often seen as amateurish, and Radolfzell, little concerned with fundamental biological questions, was not different in this regard. While some publications focused on new research into the ground ecology in particular regions along migration pathways (Schüz et al. Reference Schüz, Berthold, Gwinner and Oelke1971, 90), much of the station’s work was outdated. Löhrl wanted more European cooperation, more fieldwork, and a closer integration of laboratory and field methods.Footnote ³³ For this, ecological research into long-distance migrants, such as white storks, was regarded as key.Footnote ³⁴ When, in the 1970s and 1980s, new international conventions highlighted the need for the protection of migratory birds across country borders, ornithologists in Radolfzell, including Berthold, at the time on a postdoctoral fellowship under Löhrl, saw this as a chance to regain a new leading position in international migration ecology and white stork conservation (Nowak Reference Nowak, Biber, Enggist, Marti and Salathé1995, 303–6).

The goal of developing a new method for stork migration research, which would deliver detailed data on the course of the migration, including exact time and location data, was embraced by researchers at Radolfzell.Footnote ³⁵ Working with “true migrants,” birds flying distances of more than 1000km, would enable transregional protection, environmental research, and international cooperation with countries of what was then the first, second, and third world.Footnote ³⁶ It was hoped that migration ecology, including stork telemetry, but also other methods, such as field observations and experiments with captured birds, would increase the support for this type of fundamental research. In the 1990s, with the development of smaller senders that could be fitted on the backs of migrating white storks, these long-term goals of science-based migration research and cross-border cooperation finally seemed realizable.

In 1995, Radolfzell’s Israeli partners, including Leshem, together with Tel Aviv University, founded an International Center for the Study of Bird Migration located at the Armoured Corps Memorial in Latrun in central Israel, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, bordering the West Bank. Research conducted together with the MPI Radolfzell was one of the key tasks of the center. Real time information was transferred to aviation companies and the air forces of participating neighboring countries. MPI researchers, together with the scientists involved in one of fourteen associated field stations in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan saw themselves as promoters of the regional peace process (Leshem Reference Leshem and Schulz1999). As Berthold later recalled, “we were so successful in this Peace Process … that we for instance had permission … to organize a ringing workshop with Palestinians … in the rose garden of the Knesset [the State of Israel’s house of parliament].Footnote ³⁷ Ornithologists had come to see themselves as politically neutral diplomats.

Stork conservation programs based on telemetry were also integrated in educational campaigns. However, these, and the representations of storks they used, took quite a different form compared to that of the WWF-ICBP projects aimed at educating African peasants. In education, too, the focus was on international cooperation. Berthold and his colleagues envisioned participation in a world education program, in which schoolchildren from different nations could follow tracked and border crossing migrants like Caesar online, using modern computer technology and learning about bird biology and conservation.Footnote ³⁸ In Israel, Leshem shared these ambitions. With financial support from the William H. Gates Foundation (now the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and the German Ministry for the Environment, Leshem set up a cross-cultural program called “Migrating Birds Know No Boundaries,” which, based on data produced in cooperation with Radolfzell, aimed at jointly educating schoolchildren from Israel, Palestine, and Jordan in bird ecology (Leshem Reference Leshem and Schulz1999). The project was an internationally celebrated, regional success, albeit only for a short period between 1998 and the beginnings of the Second Intifada in 2000.

Overall, then, the projects by MPI ornithologists and their Israeli partners not only focused on a different technology from that used by earlier ornithologists; they also represented a different set of ambitions. Many of the assumptions underlying stork migration research in Radolfzell and collaborating institutes dated back to postwar attempts to revive German ornithologists’ international standing and international cooperation in migration ecology. This becomes clear when looking at the ways in which researchers in Radolfzell represented migratory white storks. Images of storks as border crossing, cosmopolitan birds, in this regard, mirrored MPI researchers’ self-understanding and served their self-fashioning, placing the institute’s work in longer traditions of scientific excellence and international diplomacy.