Our devastation of nature is so extreme that reversing even a small part of it requires painstaking, quixotic efforts.
The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption—as much pendulum as plane—reared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit.
The birds, three dozen in all, were members of a species called the northern bald ibis: funny-looking, totemic, nearly extinct. The humans were a team of scientists and volunteers, Austrians and Germans, mostly, who had dedicated the next two months, or in some cases their lives, to the task of reintroducing these birds to the wild in Europe, four centuries after they disappeared from the continent. The woman with the bullhorn was Barbara Steininger, or Babsi, one of the birds’ two foster mothers, who had hand-raised them since their hatching, four months before. The pilot was the project leader, Johannes Fritz, a fifty-seven-year-old scientist and Pied Piper. Almost every August for the past twenty years, he has led a flock of juveniles on a fall migration, to teach them how, and where, to travel. This was this flock’s first day on the move. They had seven weeks and seventeen hundred miles to go until, assuming more miracles, they would reach wintering grounds on the southern coast of Spain.
I caught up with the migration in the Spanish countryside twenty-two days later. I’d been invited along by a group of documentary filmmakers, whose effort to shoot this undertaking was perhaps as cracked as the migration itself, as they tried to film creatures they were forbidden to approach.
The bird team and the filmmakers were camped, at some remove from each other, at an old aviation club, a farm with an airstrip of stubbled grass, near the Catalonian village of Ordis, ninety minutes northeast of Barcelona. I arrived at the camp more than an hour before dawn. Already, the bird team and the film people were bustling around with headlamps on, everyone whispering so as not to disturb the birds. No one but the foster mothers was allowed near the ibises, and the bird team’s vans and mess tent formed a buffer between the birds and the rest of the camp. The first sliver of light in the east revealed their movable aviary, a box of netted scaffolding the size of a barn, with a few dozen birds perched in silhouette, like hieroglyphs.
Fritz rolled back the door of a corrugated-metal hangar and began to wheel the microlight out toward the airstrip. He’s tall and very lean; he works out twice a day. He’d just been out in the darkness running laps around the airstrip in his underwear. Now he’d donned the flight suit. “I’ve had this for twenty years,” he said. “It has the aura. It makes me into the pilot.” Under it, he wore a catheter connected to a drainage bag, in case the day went long.
Out in the field, prepping the vessel for flight, he began to describe the microlight, in Werner Herzog-accented English. “It may not look safe, but it is safe,” he said. “We have had crashes, emergency landings, all of this, but never with injuries.” He’d customized it to include a cage around the propeller, to protect the birds from being cut to bits. With a full payload of eighteen gallons of fuel and two humans, it weighs eight hundred and fifty pounds and can fly for more than four hours, topping out (tailwind not included) at around thirty miles per hour. An extra-large parachute provides the preferred loft and drag. “I love to fly slow,” Fritz said.
He laid out the chute on the grass, more than six hundred square feet of yellow fabric. Tyler Schiffman, the film’s director, explained that the birds had been conditioned to follow the color yellow. The foster moms wore yellow, but no one else was allowed to. “That’s the one major rule,” he said, giving me a once-over. No yellow on me.
Behind him, some ten miles away, you could see the Mediterranean agleam in the rising sun; Schiffman and his director of photography, Campbell Brewer, filmed the preparations, which in such gilded backlight seemed Elysian, or Malickian. They’d installed a camera on the frame of the microlight, and could control it remotely, from a pursuit van.
Helena Wehner, the second foster mom, led the birds out of the aviary, singing to them as she went, like Maria von Trapp. I headed for a helicopter, a few hundred yards away; the filmmakers had rented it for a week. It came with a pilot, and they’d hired an aerial-camera operator, a voluble Englishman named Simon Werry. Werry had a rotating camera mounted under the cockpit, which he manipulated with a joystick. Brewer was in the front seat with another camera. I joined Werry in back. “I got a terrible bollocking from one of the bird mothers yesterday for walking too close to the birds,” he said. “In the heli, we have to stay three hundred metres away.”
A half hour passed, the two aircraft at rest in a field, the birds jabbing at the soil. “This is the light we’ve been waiting for,” Brewer said. “Bummer.” Apparently, the local air-traffic control was withholding permission to fly. Each stage had its myriad complications. In France, a crop duster—bright yellow, of course—had come a few dozen feet from the microlight. And the day before, while attempting to cross the Pyrenees, the helicopter pilot had requested permission over the radio from French air-traffic controllers, who replied, “Fuck off with your ducks.”
Clearance came at 7:49 a.m. Nine minutes later, both the microlight and the helicopter were aloft, as were the birds. Fritz’s voice came over the radio: “More distance for the birds.” The helicopter backed off.
Below us were hayfields and stone barns, copses and creeks. We passed over a complex of villas girding a golf course, each with a pool.
“Fucking Spain,” Werry muttered, then said, “Oh, there go the birds!”
“They’re looking like they really want to fly today,” Brewer said.
Fritz circled the airfield, in an attempt to get the birds to fall in behind. From this distance, it was hard to tell what was happening; everyone watched the monitors instead.
Brewer: “Wait, are the birds with him?”
“I can’t see them.”
“I think he’s lost them.”
“Go on, follow, you little shits,” Werry said. “The buggers have turned back. They’re not so committed today.”
The birds alighted in the field, and, after a few more attempts to get them going, Fritz landed, too. It was 8:55 a.m. In flying terms, the day was done.
Our devastation of nature is so deep and vast that to reverse its effects, on any front, often entails efforts that are so painstaking and quixotic as to border on the ridiculous. Condor or cod, grassland or glacier: we do what we can, but the holes in the dyke outnumber the available thumbs. Fritz’s microlight brings to mind Noah’s ark, except that it has room for only one niche victim of our age of extinction. The commitment, ingenuity, and sacrifice required to try to save just this one species demonstrate how dire the situation has become, and yet the undertaking also reflects a stubborn hope that’s every bit as human as the tendency to destroy. Fervor in the face of futility: what other choice do we have? That’s the idea behind Fritz’s northern-bald-ibis project, anyway. This is what it takes, so let’s get to it.
The species’s past was more distinguished than its present. Millennia ago, the birds dwelled in the cliffs east of the Nile, a place associated with sunrise, and thus with life and rebirth. This is how, some say, they became the source for the Egyptian hieroglyphic for Akh, which can represent the persistence of the spirit of the dead. In Turkey and the Middle East, the birds crop up in folklore as heralds of spring, guides for pilgrims, and the first creatures, along with two doves, to disembark from Noah’s ark. The species once thrived in Central Europe, too. Conrad Gessner, the sixteenth-century Swiss physician, naturalist, and linguist, and reputedly the first European to describe the guinea pig, the tulip, and the pencil, is also said to be the first to write extensively about the northern bald ibis. He described them as quite tasty, with tender flesh and soft bones. The fledglings were savored by the nobility and the clergy, who, according to Fritz’s research, passed decrees to keep commoners from killing them, to preserve them for themselves. But to no avail: pressured by hunters and, most likely, by the harsh climate of the Little Ice Age, the bald ibis didn’t stand a chance. By the early part of the seventeenth century, it had disappeared from Europe.
In its absence, it acquired a mythical status; depictions could be found in old drawings and altarpieces. But colonies persisted in Turkey, Syria, Algeria, and Morocco, and after European ornithologists made the connection, in the nineteenth century, they realized that these were the birds they’d seen only in reproductions—and that they had in fact once really existed.
In the nineteen-fifties, several juveniles were imported from Morocco to a zoo in Basel. In the following decades, their offspring proliferated there and in other European zoos. By then, they’d acquired a Latin name, Geronticus eremita:elderly hermit. It suited them. Geronticus eremita is chicken-legged, oily black, with a macaque’s red face, a long curving beak, and an Einsteinian shock of feathers that spike back from an otherwise bare brow.
But, until recently, the European transplants had little use for flight. They didn’t migrate; they idled away their winters at the zoo. Meanwhile, all but the last traces of wild northern bald ibises, in North Africa and the Middle East, were vanishing, too, as a result of hunting, habitat loss, pesticides, and electrocution. In 2002, an Italian ecologist discovered seven migratory northern bald ibises in Syria. The last one disappeared in 2014. “That’s the year they went extinct as a migratory species,” Fritz said.
In the early nineties, Fritz, who’d grown up on a farm in the mountains near Innsbruck, was working with ravens at a research station in the Alm River valley, under the auspices of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. He hand-raised chicks, performing some of the imprinting techniques that Lorenz, one of the founders of the field of animal behavior, had pioneered. For his Ph.D., he moved on to greylag geese, the species with which Lorenz had done his most famous work. “I trained goslings to open tiny boxes,” Fritz said. “I wanted to learn if they can learn rules.” He was especially interested in the way the skills he’d taught them spread through the population. The idea was that a human could imprint behaviors on animals which they would then pass down to subsequent generations. (His colleagues, he said, are now teaching corvids to use computers, with a touch screen: tiny boxes, of a more insidious kind.)
The research station had acquired a small colony of northern bald ibises. One morning in early August, the researchers went to the roost and found that the juveniles, all of them, had disappeared. An eagle? An owl? But then civilians started calling in sightings. Before long, the researchers were fielding reports from points as far-flung as Poland and the Netherlands.
Perhaps because the birds had flown north, no one thought at first that this juvenile wanderlust might be an expression of a latent migratory instinct. “They went the wrong direction,” Fritz said. But the following year, with a new brood of bald-ibis fledglings, it happened again: one August morning, an empty roost. This time, the reports of itinerant ibises came from as far away as Hungary and St. Petersburg. “We started to understand that these birds were motivated by migratory restlessness,” Fritz said.
This captured Fritz’s imagination. Around 2001, he was commencing his postdoctoral work, on the traditional path of becoming a serious scientist. Yet at the same time he began to wonder if he could train these wandering birds. He started taking flight lessons outside Vienna.
The idea came to him from “Fly Away Home,” the 1996 feature film that people of a certain age and disposition might consider a touchstone. A thirteen-year-old girl, played by Anna Paquin, loses her mother in a car accident in New Zealand and goes to live in Ontario with her father, a sculptor and inventor, played by Jeff Daniels. She finds sixteen abandoned goose eggs and secretly raises the goslings. Complications ensue, but the upshot is that father and daughter decide to help the geese migrate to a sanctuary in North Carolina. The father builds a microlight, but, since the birds have been imprinted with the idea that Paquin’s character is their mother, they won’t follow anyone but her, so he teaches her to fly.
The film was based on the story of a Canadian artist and inventor named Bill Lishman, who lived on a farm near Lake Scugog, in Ontario. He built a home there on top of a hill but into the ground, a series of interconnecting domed circular structures, to reduce the need for heat and air-conditioning. Lishman was, among many other things, a pioneer of microlight flight, and he had a lifelong dream of flying with birds. In the late eighties, when he was in his fifties, he and his kids, under the tutelage of a Lorenz acolyte, raised some goslings by hand and trained them to follow a motorcycle and then a microlight. In 1993, he led his first goose migration, from the farm to Virginia. He made a documentary (“C’mon Geese!”), published a memoir (“Father Goose”), and even appeared as Daniels’s flight double in “Fly Away Home.” After a “20/20” segment about him, on ABC, the co-host Hugh Downs said, “I think it’s the most beautiful story that we’ve had on ‘20/20’ in its fifteen years.”
“What a joy,” Barbara Walters said. “Ah, if we could all fly.”
Lishman also co-founded Operation Migration, an effort to establish migratory habits and self-sustaining populations in species such as whooping cranes. It didn’t really take.
In 2001, at the age of thirty-four, Fritz started hand-raising bald ibises for the purpose of training them to fly with him. “From an objective point of view, it was not a logical decision, or a very good one,” he told me. “I thought I’d do it for one or two years maybe and then get back to serious work. Twenty-five years later, I’m still the one who tries to fly with the crazy birds.”
There were no historic records of where the European northern bald ibises might have migrated to, so Fritz settled on Tuscany; it was the closest suitably southern climate to Austria, and there were popular wintering sites there for migratory birds.
“At the time, we didn’t account for the Alps,” Fritz said.
Between 2004 and 2022, Fritz led juveniles south from Bavaria into Italy fifteen times, plotting a passage clear of the higher peaks and the more treacherous winds. Eventually, many of the birds, as hoped, then began making the annual return trip back north. Last year, fourth-generation descendants of birds he taught to migrate made the journey to Tuscany on their own. (In the first fifteen migrations, Fritz took two hundred and eighty birds to Italy, the first group of which began mating and migrating in 2011; those have so far produced three hundred and eighty-three fledglings in the wild.) It wasn’t just for sentimental purposes. Migratory ibises have a survival rate of between two and three fledglings per female, which is almost three times that of some nonmigratory populations.
And yet, each year, more and more birds were leaving Germany or Austria and failing to make it over the Alps. Warmer autumns, owing to climate change, were causing them to stick around longer; then they hit the mountains and got turned around or killed by wintry weather. Last year, forty-two birds from the Tuscany years failed to make it over the Alps, the most ever.
In 2022, while Fritz was leading twenty-eight birds through the mountains of South Tyrol, one of them disappeared. Its name was Ingrid. (Ingrid was a male. The birds get names before anyone knows their sex.) Outfitted with a G.P.S. tracker, Ingrid embarked on an alternative route, across the northern part of Switzerland and into France, south along the Rhône to the Mediterranean, then over the Pyrenees and all the way down to Málaga, on the southern coast of Spain. It was an astounding journey, a long and perilous solo improvisation. There was a population of nonmigratory northern bald ibises nearby, in Cádiz, monitored by an outfit called Proyecto Eremita, which took Ingrid in.
Maybe this ibis knew something. Certainly, it would be better for Fritz, as a pilot, to avoid crossing the Alps. Plus, as he later learned, paleontologists had found evidence of the presence of northern bald ibises in Gibraltar, twenty-five thousand years ago, and near Valencia, 2.5 million years ago. From this, Fritz concluded that the northern bald ibis may well have been migrating along this corridor for millions of years. “And so Ingrid was the first to revive this tradition after four hundred years,” Fritz said. “This is incredible, no?”
In 2023, Fritz, for the first time, followed the Ingrid route, and led the ibises to southern Spain, instead of Tuscany. It was a longer, harder, and more expensive trip, but, he reckoned, better for the species’s long-term survival.
That summer, Schiffman, who had recently made a documentary for National Geographic about relocating giraffes, read a story in the Times about Fritz, the Waldrapp project (Waldrapp is the German term for the species), and the first migration to Spain. Schiffman’s father was an I.T./A.V. technician who’d done some work for Matt Damon. Damon and Ben Affleck have a production company called Artists Equity, which agreed to fund a trip to Spain. Schiffman caught up with the migration outside Roquetes. His mind was blown: “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe this works!”
Eventually, Fritz agreed to collaborate with Schiffman, Artists Equity, and a co-producer, Insignia Films. (Later, Sandbox Films and Fifth Season signed on, too.) Now Schiffman had to figure out how to shoot a subject he couldn’t get close to. For the chicks’ nursery, in a shipping container, Schiffman and his team devised a wall with one-way soundproofed glass—each nest in its own stage-lit box—and found an Austrian glassmaker to fabricate it. The mirrored side faced in, but the birds apparently do not recognize themselves. There were nine nests, each holding as many as five birds. On the outside, the crew laid tracks along which the camera would slide from one nest to the next. Flight was another matter.
The 2024 cycle commenced in the mountains of Carinthia, in southern Austria, where Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein owns and maintains an open-air zoo and game park on the grounds of an old castle ruin. A colony of about thirty northern bald ibises nests in an aviary, accessed through an open window. They are considered “wild”—free-flying, except in winter—but mostly sedentary, meaning they don’t migrate.
In early April, these birds hatched chicks. Within a week, the zookeeper, Lynne Hafner, had gone from nest to nest to select the fittest ones. They were removed from the parents’ nests—a heartrending process, but it’s for the species’s own good, the humans tell themselves—and transferred to the shipping container, where they came under the care of the foster moms. The foster moms basically live inside the container. They go from nest to nest, sitting with the birds, singing and talking to them, even spitting on their food, to give the birds a digestive enzyme that’s in saliva. (For this, the foster moms must forgo caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol.)
Five weeks later, with the birds on the verge of fledging, the ibis team put them in crates and trucked them to a new site north of the Austrian border, an organic farm in the Bavarian countryside. The ibises’ first flight outside the aviary was chaos. They bumbled up in three dozen directions, as kestrels swooped in to attack. Some ibises crash-landed, while a couple of others flew off and went missing for hours. Already, the foster moms had introduced the birds to the sound of the microlight—from a Bluetooth speaker—and then to the vehicle itself. Later, they were shown the parachute. Finally, the moms turned on the engine and drove the microlight around a field, as the birds flew clumsily behind.
Of course, the day before my arrival had been the best one, for the birds and the cameras. The camp was still buzzing about it. Schiffman, over coffee, set the scene.
The first week, the birds knocked off three hefty flight segments, each several hours long, to reach the border between Germany and France. But then the weather turned sour, and they were grounded for three days. On the fourth day, as they entered France, a quarter of the flock turned around and returned to the takeoff spot. The foster mom in the van following on the ground—the two women take turns driving and flying—had to go back to the start, and then spend hours on the airfield, in the blistering sun, herding the birds into crates, before driving hours to rejoin the others. The next two weeks, as they made their way south through France, were a grind. Since the ibises couldn’t be exposed to another human voice, Schiffman, once, riding along with them, had to remain silent for seven hours, raw-dogging it in the van. It didn’t exactly make for great cinema, either.
By the time they reached Narbonne, on the French side of the Pyrenees, everyone was feeling beaten down. Morale in (and between) the film and bird crews was low, to say nothing of the mood of the birds themselves, which no one could surmise. The birds could not be crated across the Pyrenees. By Fritz’s logic, it was the only section they absolutely needed to fly, to train their inner compass for the return journey. “They need to know how to get across the mountains,” he said.
After three days and one failed attempt, despite a threat of storms, and even though the helicopter was running late, they decided to go for it again. They set off at 7:30 a.m. The birds fell in behind the microlight, and they flew toward the Mediterranean, to avoid towns and air-traffic-control zones.
“Please tell me there’s a plan to cross the Pyrenees,” Schiffman radioed to Fritz.
“There’s a five-per-cent chance,” Fritz replied. “I’ll make the decision in the air.”
It started to rain. Droplets splattered the lens of the chopper cam.
“Johannes, are you going to cross the Pyrenees?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
Dark clouds pressed in over the peaks. The ground team was making its own way toward a tunnel that ran under the pass Fritz intended to fly over. “I’m taking the shot,” Fritz said over the radio. “We’re going through the Pyrenees.”
As Schiffman recounted all this to me, the following day, his eyes began to well up. He’s a bright-eyed, youthful Californian, poised and irrepressible; you could imagine him as the network’s preferred front-runner on a wilderness-survival reality show. “So then the rain gets worse,” he went on. “The lens is getting doused. We’re so close to the pass! I’m, like, ‘You can’t do this to me, lens!’ We break off the route, and the pilot goes full speed to air-dry the lens.”
As the helicopter rejoined the route, Fritz flew by with the birds trailing in perfect formation, backlit, and then crested the pass. “I got my money shot,” Schiffman said.
On the Spanish side, the flock cycled on the thermals and then followed Fritz to the landing strip in Ordis, where we were now.
“In the twenty years I’ve done this, this was the most unexpected flight I’ve ever had,” Fritz said. The foster moms chattered and laughed with the birds, plying them with grubs. The aviary was erected, and the birds, exhausted and—who knows—perhaps even gratified, didn’t dither for hours, as they typically did. The crew laid out a spread of wine and cheese. The airfield had a saltwater swimming pool, and Fritz, stripping down to his skivvies, jumped in, and then, towelling off, said, “Are we flying tomorrow?”
We were, and then we weren’t. It turns out that migrating is a lot like filmmaking: hurry up and wait.
“Every theory about why they fly or not gets discredited,” Schiffman told me. “The latest was that they’d gotten too acclimated to this or that stop. Well, that theory’s shot.”
Other theories had to do with the time of day, or fluctuations in the composition of their feed, or various other distractions. Were “the rebel birds,” as Fritz called the recalcitrant ones, always the same, in this group, or did recalcitrance move through the flock like a virus? Fritz and his team, like coaches deep in a slump, tried to discern patterns of noncompliance. They wondered if one foster mom was having more success than the other, a touchy line of inquiry.
“I could’ve been a professor, but now instead I fly with some crazy birds,” Fritz said. He was sitting in a folding chair in the shade, a hundred yards from the aviary. “But I’m convinced that this method can be of value and will be of value for other conservation needs.”
For the program’s first dozen years, it relied on money from institutions and private donors. For the past ten, it has run on grants from the European Union. The latest one provides about a million euros a year, covering some sixty per cent of the costs. The Spanish migration alone is roughly three hundred and fifty thousand euros. A lot of effort, and money, goes toward preventing poaching, which is responsible for a third of bald-ibis deaths in Italy.
The idea of imprinting, and of intervening in nature generally, has become more fashionable in conservation circles. “Ten years ago, this was seen as too interventionist, but now it’s ‘whatever it takes,’ ” Schiffman said. To Fritz, scientists who insisted on habitat preservation alone were stuck in the past. “It’s too late to just preserve land as is,” he said. “Now we need to save the animals in a way that enables them to live with us.”
Fritz toggled between optimism and pessimism. “Being pessimistic is often just an excuse for doing nothing,” he said. “But the other side of the coin is that after twenty years of work for this one species it still is in danger—increasingly in danger—because of climate change. If you only communicate that there is reason for hope and everyone is happy, I think this is a naïve vision. It’s not the full truth.”
Overhead, there came a sudden eruption of birdsong. “Ooh, bee-eaters!” Fritz exclaimed. “Very colorful! They are migrating, too. They join us every year.” We sat and listened. Later, a flock of storks came wheeling in high on the thermals, and the camp gathered to watch.
“It’s such a great feeling to be on the way of this migration and know that millions and millions of birds migrate together with you, ja, so we are exactly where we should be, ja?” he said. “But maybe it would be better to be with birds that have the motivation to migrate!”
The film crew and a lot of the ibis team slept in vans or cars, but a dozen or so volunteers had pitched their tents in the yard of a five-hundred-year-old stone chapel on the grounds of the old farm—an aviary of their own—and I found a gravel patch there for my tent, without taking into account the concerto of zippers, snores, and farts that would serenade me through the night. On the other side of the chapel was the swimming pool, surrounded by fig and plum trees and a wire fence vined with grapes, and a kind of galilee that looked out over the foothills of the Pyrenees. Glamigrating, Catalonian style.
The film crew had a chef from Barcelona, Francesca Baixas, who sourced her ingredients fresh most days at reasonable cost in local markets. (Europe!) They took their meals at a picnic table by the clubhouse, and Baixas never repeated a meal. (That night was butifarra sausage and garbanzo beans, with a cabbage-and-potato pie.) Fifty yards away, the ibis team, accustomed or philosophically inclined to plainer living, kept to a vegan and gluten-free regimen. Their devotion to the cause, and their flinty brand of Central European bohemianism, could come off as cultish, in a benign way. Occasionally, the smell of grilled meat wafted over from the film table to the ibis table, and some people from the latter would sneak over. One evening, Fritz came by. “Good evening,” he said. “This table gets bigger and bigger. We worry you start to dominate us.”
As for the birds, a big portion of their migratory diet is meat, prepared by the Vienna Zoo, which helps run the project. “They put dead rats in a blender, tails up,” a team member told me. “Or else chicken, cow’s hearts, chopped and mixed with white cheese.” Far be it from a visiting humanist, in the company of trained biologists, to attempt to understand the brain of a bird, but one might speculate that such a diet might now and then discourage the motivation to fly.
The birds also ate mealworms. The foster moms scattered the worms out on the airfield, whenever the ibises completed a flight, to dissuade them from flying away again. During the day, Christine Schachenmeier, who owns the organic farm in Germany where the fledglings learned to fly, and Gunnar Hartmann brought out crates of mealworms, each containing thousands of grubs on a bed of sawdust and egg-carton cardboard. They culled them by hand, removing the dead ones and the cocoons.
Hartmann was the route coördinator, calculating distances, finding and arranging landings and campsites, and managing the patchwork of permissions necessary to fly through or around the gantlets of restricted airspace along the way. “Last year was much wilder,” he said. “We landed in fields, had to find natural springs to get water. We had no sanitary services.”
Schachenmeier was the camp elder, granite-faced with a seraphic air. For almost forty years, she had been a doctor at a hospital in Rosenheim, treating cancer patients and working in emergency care, but during the Covid pandemic she retired and devoted herself full time, with her husband, Frank, to the organic farm. In addition to cattle and chickens, she raised bats, and had learned to hand-nurse orphaned bats with artificial milk. “This migration of Johannes, it is a very courageous enterprise,” she said. “The birds are very vulnerable even if the world stays as it is, but I don’t think the world is getting any better.” She went on, “It costs a lot of sacrifice. Even for the birds. They are more secure if they are in the zoo.”
By 5 a.m. the next day, the camp was astir. The foster moms, Babsi and Helena, tumbled out of their van. Helena combed her hair. Babsi brushed her teeth. Babsi and Helena wore shorts and yellow hoodies; both were very tan. Babsi took down the electric fence around the aviary, set at night to protect against predators. (In 2017, a fox got in and took two birds.) Then she began hauling bags of feed to the entrance. Helena joined her, limping in a knee brace: she had recently torn her meniscus. Some ibises flapped down to greet her.
Babsi is a carpenter’s daughter from Lower Austria, with a sharp sense of humor and, on her left biceps, a tattoo of an ibis. She had studied at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center, hand-raising greylag geese. “I came across the bald ibis when they visited me there in the woods with my goose family,” she said. It was her second year as a foster mom, and Helena’s fifth.
Babsi listed off the names of the ibises, which mostly fell into groupings corresponding to their adoptive nests. There were Voldemort, Fluffy, Aragog, and Grindelwald (“our Harry Potter nest”); Queenie, Genti, Diva (after Helena’s horse stable); Catan, Canasta, Uno, Dixit (games); Levante, Poniente, Fernanda, Marisma (wind systems, Spanish friends); Tarifa, Conil, Achilles, Meniscus, Optimas (“That is my favorite wine”). Schnapsi was the flock’s schlimazel. “In the beginning, you could always tell Schnapsi from the others, a white bird covered in shit,” Babsi said.
Babsi and Helena spend six months straight with the brood. “My grandmother doesn’t like it,” Babsi said. “She says, ‘You are never here for apricot season. You’re always with those ugly birds.’ ”
“When they’re flying, they are beautiful,” she went on. “I get why people say they’re ugly, in the cage. It’s O.K. when they call them ugly. But don’t call them stupid.” She went on, “I think they sense when we are under pressure. We have a very strong connection with them. These birds are trained but not domesticated. They follow a plane. I think it’s a miracle they do that. But everyone watching them, rooting for them but having no control—I finally understand why people like sports.”
“It is kind of magical, the love and trust from another species,” Helena said. “Other birds seem to trust us more, too. They sense the trust of the ibis. You’re kind of being invited to the bird world.”
The two of them spent most of each day inside the aviary, occasionally taking solo shifts while the other prepared food. Helena, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in applied earth observation, occasionally read to them from “Harry Potter.” They sat on mats, surrounded by their birds, which spattered them with jets of excrement. No one else was allowed in the aviary, or even near it—“The King of England could come and he’s not going in there,” Helena said—except under cover of a blind they set up outside the structure, some twenty yards away, which you could access only with permission and stealth. From there, I got to observe the moms hand-feeding the birds from Tupperware containers, a few at a time. The moms chattered and laughed and sang, while the birds made a croaking sound.
Fritz emerged from his van, fresh off a 6 a.m. radio interview. “I can’t escape,” he said. He pointed west with a jug of water, toward a dale where a skein of fog skulked in the early light; as though to ward it off, he said nothing.
On the airfield, he began prepping his microlight. Schiffman and Brewer futzed with the cameras. The foster moms had opened the aviary and were letting out the birds.
I retreated with one of the producers to a patch of scrub grass, out of sight of the birds and the cameras. We lay down in the stubble, at the edge of a sunflower plot, the fallen heads strewn in the arid soil like abandoned hornet’s nests. A light breeze kicked up. The sunflower stalks rattled. As the sun warmed the field, the flies got to work.
There were cameras in place. The birds waddled out into the field, as Fritz’s engine sputtered up. The atmosphere of anticipation and reverence, this collective yearning, a combination of hope and deference, seemed liturgical in a way that connected all the human figures scattered across the acres.
The birds began to fly, as Helena called out to them. “Here she comes,” the producer said. Helena began running across the field, toward the microlight. She took big but uneven strides, on account of the knee. Fritz, in the microlight, was waving his arms like a bird. Helena reached the microlight, adjusted her ponytail, and then climbed into the back seat, as the birds flew in ragged circles nearby. Fritz revved the engine, a desperate, needling whine, and the vessel lurched down the airstrip, the chute billowing awake behind him. And then, just like that, the craft was airborne, and Fritz throttled down, and for a moment it hung there, almost ludicrously slow, appearing to swing like a plumb beneath the chute, before turning toward the east, where the rising sun flashed off the sea. You could hear Helena’s keening singsong through the megaphone, a kind of Teutonic muezzin. “Komme, komme, Waldi!” Come, come, Baldies. Two tones, up-down up-down, like a crowd chanting, “Let’s go, Rang-ers!”
The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead.
The birds wobbled toward the airfield and then landed where the microlight had been. You might not be allowed to call them stupid, but they were certainly stubborn. Fritz swung back low toward the birds and rousted them by nearly flying through them.
Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are. Fritz made laps, orbits passing like days.
The birds fell in again behind the microlight. They all started south, receding. Komme, komme, Waldi—it was happening. The heart leaped. But within moments they were back, without their escort. The microlight, at the edge of earshot, tracked toward the sea. Maybe Fritz was giving up, and fleeing with Helena for Ibiza. Fuck off with your ducks. But after a few moments he turned back and landed. Helena got out and began herding the birds back into the aviary. They ducked right in, eager for the comfort of the cage, like dogs in a thunderstorm.
The theorizing resumed. Had they started too late? Was it Helena? To go by the recriminations coming across the radios, the foster mothers were miffed about several camera placements and an incursion by a photographer from a local birding club. The film crew convened at the edge of the camp, aware that perhaps they were under some fire. Schiffman, grinning in the way he did when he was especially anxious, motioned me over and pointed toward the camp, at a fence line. “What the fuck?” he said. “There’s one rule!” There was a tent hanging in the sun to dry. My tent. One side of it was bright yellow.
Out by the hangar, still in his suit, Fritz did his debrief. “This was really strange,” he said. “Don’t ask me about the reason why they behave like that. We need a seminar.”
The team convened in the mess tent. The foster moms, the Waldi oracles, were rattled, and, in spite of their better judgment, inclined to find blame.
One of the producers apologized for the positioning of a camera: “It was a total mistake. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not the reason, but it’s not not a factor,” Helena said. “They really get easily distracted.” No one mentioned my yellow tent.
“No, no, don’t worry,” Fritz told the film crew. He refused to blame anyone, except maybe this batch of birds. He told me, “It’s not monocausal. There’s been a complex change in the psychology of the birds. The birds we had in Narbonne seemed to be other birds. Now they are switched again. It’s a very fascinating example of a group dynamic in a social context.” He reckoned that in the birds, as in humans, the causes could be “endocrinological.”
The migration was still six days ahead of the previous year’s pace, and so Fritz decreed that they would pass up the good weather to give the birds time to reset their psychology. “We must allow them to change. We must pay attention to nutritional aspects. In the past, we have increased the number of insects. More crickets. They need calcium and vitamins.”
Helena said, “We have to order more vitamins.”
That night, with no flight the next day and therefore no predawn call time, some members of the film crew had a little party, with Aperol spritzes procured at a supermarket in the nearby town of Figueres.
Schiffman, in a sparkly mood, insisted on putting on “Fly Away Home”—“This song! I love this song! Here it is. Yes! We’re all gonna be O.K.!”—and, after a while, Helena, finished in the aviary and on her way to the shower, dropped by and started doing her ibis sound, a wet intake of the breath, like a high-register slurp. They cued up a shot of Helena in a gale, huddled in an open field with dozens of birds pressed up against her, as though she were a boulder or a tree.
Weeks later, after a slog through Spain, days of aborted attempts and reluctant cratings brightened by moments of providence and triumph—all told, fifty-one days of migration, with nineteen stages covering seventeen hundred miles, Fritz’s longest ever, with the greatest number of birds—the ibises arrived in Andalusia. Some of them assented to a ceremonial final flight, a last twirl for the cameras and dignitaries, like the Parisian leg of the Tour de France. And then they went to meet their predecessors and their nonmigratory cousins in Cádiz. They’d made it.
Ingrid, their pioneer, their Brigham Young, was not there to greet them. In the spring, he had set off north, motivated apparently by that old migratory restlessness. A couple of Fritz’s other transplants had persuaded some of the nonmigratory ibises of Cádiz to fly north with them, which is what he’d hoped, but Ingrid flew solo. A tracker showed Ingrid travelling more than two hundred miles a day. And then, on the fourth day, he stopped. His carcass was found in the Pyrenees. The forensics indicated death by predation. Avian, not human. An eagle, most likely. A natural end.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02/17/the-long-flight-to-teach-an-endangered-ibis-species-to-migrate