Bird train and migration: A book combines flight and freedom

Bird train and migration: A book combines flight and freedom

Gehrde, Deutschland - The wall sailors are always a fascinating topic, especially for Imke Müller-Hellmann. In her latest book "The Train of the Wall Sailers", she linked the impressive bird feeding of these animals with the migration routes of people traveling between Europe and Africa. Her passion for the wall sailors, who appear in Bremen every year and finally disappear again, motivated her to ask deeper questions about the living conditions in the thoroughfare regions of the birds and to take a critical look at their own prejudices. This revealed the animal fate, which often shows parallels to the challenges of people on the run, especially during the two annual crossing of the Sahara by these birds.

in Gehrde, Müller-Hellmann accompanied some researchers in the equipment of wall sailors with geolocators-small devices that enable precise tracking of the migration routes. In doing so, she watched the birds on a church roof floor and had the opportunity to capture them to check the geolocators. Of the three wall sailors, which she marked, only one returned. She called this "Jabari", which means "powerful" on Swahili. Jabari flew to Zanzibar and throws historical shadows on the colonial past in Germany, which is characterized by the Helgoland contract.

technology and research

The geolocators used by Müller-Hellmann and the researchers are remarkable technologies. They enable year-round tracking of the wandering birds because the traditional GPS systems are too heavy for most songbirds. Instead, light alternatives have been developed, including:

• light level geolocators who measure the ambient light intensity and save data with time stamps.
• Multi-sensor geolocators who also measure atmospheric pressure, temperature, bird acceleration and magnetic field intensity.

Thanks to these devices, migration patterns, places of residence and the flight behavior of the birds can be recorded in detail. This data is not only important for basic research, but also help to recognize connections between migration, reproductive success and environmental -related factors, as the bird attendant reports.

The basics of bird train research have already been laid in antiquity, with Aristotle's first theories about the train behavior. A lot has happened since then. From the 1890s, birds were systematically marked in order to be able to understand their routes and locations.

biographical points of contact

In Müller-Hellmann's work, not only the dazzling stories of the wall sailors, but also the stories of the people who live in close contact with these birds. It is an urgent look at the interaction between nature and man who should all affect us.