Yesterday I introduced the happy sloths of Panama. Today, let’s turn to happy cows. Doing whatever cows do in the Bavarian country side, they were unperturbed when a flock of large, strange white birds descended, alit on their backs and began nit-picking bovine fleece. Maybe there is something stronger than alkaloid compounds in the Bavarian water. In any case, it was enough of a strange sight that a young birder-in-training rushed to the relevant experts trying to find out what on earth had just happened.

It was a flock of unfamiliar cattle egrets who had made a wrong turn during their migration.

Some decades later, our observant youngster Martin Wikelski has become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, after teaching stints that included years at Princeton. He is still interested in birds, and now in general migration patterns as indicators of disease spread, disaster detection, and global change. He is spearheading ICARUS, (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) a program connected to the International Space Station as a tracking site for interacting animal migrations, installed last summer. (Equally impressive, in my book, is of course the fact that this guy lists adventurer in first place on his CV, scientific grandeur notwithstanding.)

He stuck with birds, but cows have not disappeared either. They are currently part of a research program that has fitted sensor-studded radio transmitters in quake-prone regions around the world to various birds and mammals, trying to pick up earthquake warnings from changes in the animals behavior and physiology (a controversial project, one might add, with geologists not convinced that animal behavior changes around the timing of an earth quake. But that will be obviously explored now.)

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What do we know about migration, though? Take one short minute and check out this video, which shows you the flow of movement across the globe. It is astounding.

We know that they move and where they move, at least for some of the species. We do not quite understand why they move such huge distances and, when finding a place that is perfectly suited, regularly leave it nonetheless to make the long trek back home. Home being not just a general area, but a specific tree in a specific forest, a distinct chimney, church tower or other nesting sites. Sometimes the specificity is encoded across generations, so that some butterflies return to exact places where their great-grand parents came from, not more immediate forbears.

We know that migration serves not just the migratory animal populations, but others along their routes, who feed on the carcasses of those who didn’t make it, or live on lands fertilized by the droppings, or cleared of pests, insects that are devoured by the birds in flight (swallows, or more precisely, swifts, fly for six months (!) non-stop, and are eating insects en route and apparently sleeping while flying as well…)

We cannot yet explain why migration happens to such far away places as the Amazon, when Ft. Lauderdale is just around the corner, equally warm and comfy, say… and why distances increased across the millennia. And in particular we have not yet figured out why on average each species follows its particular migratory routes, but then there are always outliers, who do not comform.

Leave it to our intrepid ecologist and adventurer to follow exactly these non-conforming individuals, trying to figure out if it was disease that stopped them, or external forces or something else altogether. Pursuing a stork he had named Hansi, he jets to Turkey, awaits once-daily radio transmissions to narrow the distance to the subject, and eventually finds Hansi perfectly happy and healthy gorging on frogs in some field near the Syrian border.

The hypothesis is that natural selection programs some section of the progeny to wander farther afield. That innovative individual will be important for the species to thrive, to survive when aggregate flows are threatened by disaster, by pathogens, or by obstacles put in their way by human activities. (This reminds me of a nasty fight going on between two factions of German environmentalists right now. Some want to erect wind turbines to curb carbon emissions, others fight against them to protect wetlands and birds. The laughing third is of course the oil and coal industry.)

We’ll see what the research data will reveal. In the meantime I decided to pull some hang-gliding photographs from the archives in Wikelski’s honor. He reports that he has become an avid hang glider in order to explore how it must feel to be a bird (his words.) Well, he won’t be up there for 6 months at a time…… and I also hope he is never the parent of a kid who does this – cost me many an anxious moment in my lifetime. Then again, it also took me on some pretty spectacular hikes, like the one shown here at Silverstar Mt.,WA.