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White Stork Ciconia Ciconia White Stork 20.Ciconia ciconia White Storks are conspicuous birds, weighing 3.5 kg and with a wingspan of 2 m. Each year they fl y up to 23 000 km between Europe and Africa. To avoid extended sea crossings, most White Storks tackle the Mediterranean Sea by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar or by diverting through Turkey and the Middle East, where half a million White Storks (and one million raptors) squeeze themselves into the bottleneck of Israel (Leshem & Yom-Tov 1996). This is an impressive sight, not only for birdwatchers but for anybody witnessing fl ocks of storks gaining height in thermals and gliding off in their preferred direction. In the words of David Lack (1966), a White Stork is “the most cherished of European birds. It breeds on houses and towers, also on platforms specially put up for it, and throughout its present breeding range in northern Europe it is protected not only by law but by universal sentiment”. Yet this could not stop the disastrous decline of breeding numbers in NW Europe during the 20th century. The species became extinct in Belgium (1895), Swit- zerland (1949), Sweden (1954), Italy (1960), The Netherlands (1991) and Denmark (1998). Considerable effort has been put into reintroduction efforts. Birds bred in captivity were released as young birds to breed in the wild. The 2252 Livvinng onn thee edge first ‘breeding stations’ were established in Switzerland in 1948, leading to the first free-ranging breeding pair in 1960. Breeding stations were also implemented in Belgium (1957), Alsace, France (1962), Baden-Württemberg, Germany (1968) and The Netherlands (1970). The reintroduction programmes were successful, but also elicited heated debates as to whether this was the best way to safeguard endangered species. One hostile argument was: why invest in reintroduction programmes when birds suffer high winter mortality in Africa? Nowadays, we know that conservation measures should ideally be applied wherever a bird spends significant time in its life-cycle, but biased towards where it suffers high mortality rates. Although the majority of White Storks still migrate annually to Africa, for other reasons increasing, albeit still small, numbers, no longer cross the Sahara – they winter in the Mediterranean Basin or have become resident there. Nevertheless, the future of the species continues to hinge on what happens thousands of km away from the nest platform. Breeding range 1 The breeding range of White Storks is shaped rather like a large tri- angle, encompassing much of Europe west of the line from St. Pe- tersburg to Moscow and the Crimea, but including NW Africa, much of the Middle East and Turkey. Since at least the mid-19th century, range expansions have been noticed in the species’ eastern and northeastern distribution (Schulz 1998), but without the reintro- duction programmes, the species would have disappeared from NW Europe in the late 20th century. In 2000, the estimated European population was 200 000 pairs, strongholds being in Portugal and Spain (22 000 pairs), Poland (45 000), Ukraine (30 000) and the Baltic states (25 000) (Bird Life International 2004a). Migration Since 1901, more than 300 000 White Storks have been ringed, re- sulting in a plethora of recoveries that by the 1950s had already been used to discover the general migration pattern (review in Schüz 1971), the migratory divide between eastern and western migration routes (‘Zugscheide’, Schüz 1953) and the distribution in Africa dur- ing the northern winter (reviews in Schüz 1971, Bairlein 1981). Satel- lite tracking studies since 1991 have produced information to fine- tune these findings (e.g. Berthold et al. 2001a, 2004). The migratory divide between western and eastern populations runs from The Netherlands to Switzerland (Fig. 140A). The 120 000 Without so much as a wingbeat, this sequence of climbing and gliding is repeated over and over again, enabling the birds to cover hundreds of km every day in an energy-efficient manner. A wave of gliding White Storks, 2043 to be exact, heading North above Kasanka National Park in Zambia, late March 2007 (bottom) and Black and White Storks gaining height in Israel (top). WWhitte SStork CCiconia ciconia 253.
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