The Humans Teaching Birds to Migrate

In today’s newsletter, Nick Paumgarten on his reporting about the painstaking, quixotic efforts to save an endangered species, and then:

Nick Paumgarten
Paumgarten has been a staff writer for twenty years.

I first heard about the project to facilitate a human-led migration of the northern bald ibis from a documentary producer named Amanda Pollak, who was prepping for a film about these endangered birds. It sounded very Werner Herzog to me: three dozen funny-looking, nearly extinct birds following a customized microlight aircraft for seventeen hundred miles across Europe in order to be reintroduced, with the help of “foster mothers,” into the wild, four centuries after they’d disappeared from the continent. The filmmakers eventually came around to the idea of my tagging along. As for Johannes Fritz, the pilot and project leader, he was open to any attention he could garner. I caught up with the migration in Catalonia, equipped with a tent and a sleeping bag but no real sense of what I was getting into.

What I got into was a kind of campground comedy. The migration was paused at an old aviation club, “the best airfield in Spain,” as Fritz told me. It had a swimming pool, fruit trees, grapevines, a cool little clubhouse, and an otherwise mostly unused building with a few toilets and showers. The ibis team and the film team—more than twenty people in all—cycled in and out of the bathrooms, leaving shoes at the bottom of the stairs so as not to track in dirt and to indicate that the lavatories were occupied.

The owner of the place, a stocky elder gent who reminded me of the environmentalist Yvon Chouinard, lived in an old stone house on the property. He’d agreed to let the migration stop over, but he hadn’t expected so many humans, or for the humans to stay so long. By the second night, the visitors had drained his well. He expressed his irritation, in Spanish and Catalan, and the film crew’s cook, from Barcelona, translated. The order came down: use less water. The metaphorical implications weren’t lost on the scientists: We’re here to promote conservation, and yet we can’t help but live heavy on the land. We’re all parasites.

The whole enterprise was an expression of futility and hope, despair and persistence, and also a celebration of the ability to keep in mind two opposing ideas at the same time: The natural world may be past saving, particularly as a habitat for the species that has so utterly befouled it, and, yet, what else is there to do but keep on keeping on? We do what we can.

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