STORK’S WINTER FLIGHT

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 November 1933, Page 10

STORK’S WINTER FLIGHT

A GERMAN EXPERIMENT. BERLIN, September 17. The first results have now been obtained from an interesting attempt to solve one of the most puzzling problems of biid migration. Up to the present it has been generally believed by ornithologists in this country that storks from places to the east of the Elbe travel to their winter quarters in Africa by way of the Balkans, Asia Minor and Palestine, those from districts west of the river bj- France, Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar.

It was thought that this diversity might he used to illuminate the question whether migration is entirely due io inborn instinct or whether it is in greater or less degree a result of example ami imitation. Accoidingly, 160 of this gear’s young storks were caught in East Prussia, kept in captivity at Essen and FTanktort-on-Maine till long after all their free kindred had left the countiy, and liberated a few days ago. News has now been received by the Rossitten bird observatory in East Prussia, which is carying out the ex- ] criment, that all the Essen storks took a. south-easterly direction and that some of them have been sighted to the south of the Hartz mountains. Prom this it is concluded that an unaided inherited urge in their blood is driving them along the route followed by their ancestors.

On the other hand, two of the storks set tree at Frankfort have been shot on the Loire in France where they were apparently following a line of which race memory can have told them nothing. Deductions from these curious and ccntradictory results are further complicated by unexpected heresies from a, well-known ornithologist, Heinroth, who has declared his belief that the lines of migration were never so closely followed by the storks as has Leon generally imagined. lie thin As it is quite possible that some north-east German storks have always sought Africa by the western route and vice-versa.

He also suggests that the results of the latest experiment may confirm the theory of an American naturalist that migrant birds frequently follow birds of other species when making their way towards the south.