By Peter Prokosch
After coastal birds of the East Atlantic Flyway, such as Brent geese, barnacle geese and red knots, as well as seabirds such as northern gannets and kittiwakes, were severely affected by bird flu in previous years, an unusually strong wave of bird flu is currently sweeping across Europe, affecting thousands of cranes in particular.
A current and particularly good summary and analysis of the background information can be found for our German readers at RiffReporter and Flugbegleiter by Thomas Krumenacker here:
Cranes remind me of my youth, when, as head of the ‘Migratory Bird Count’ working group at the ‘Rhenish Ornithologists’ Society’, I recorded cranes migrating in autumn and spring in an about 200 km wide corridor West Germany by placing advertisements in newspapers.
Back then, in the 1960s and 70s, there were around 20,000 cranes from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe that crossed West-Germany non-stop on their way to their winter quarters, mainly in Spain, from their resting places in the Darß and Rügen areas (in what was then GDR/East Germany).
On good migration days, the telephone at our house never stopped ringing. For many people, it was a moving moment to see cranes flying over their houses in a wedge formation, calling loudly, and they were delighted to be able to share their observations.
In the transitional year 1989/90 before the reunification of Germany, I came into even closer contact with the important crane resting places in north-eastern Germany when we witnessed the rapid creation of the ‘Boddenlandschaft’ National Park in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (see separate chapter in the book on the East Atlantic Flyway).
Later, it was a conservation miracle to see how the breeding population of cranes spread throughout Scandinavia and further and further into western Germany and Denmark. Today, crane counts in Central Europe no longer refer to 20,000, but the numbers have risen steadily and are now in the six-digit range.
This makes it all the more tragic to see how this conservation success is now being partially undone by bird flu, most probably caused by human activities. The image often portrayed in the media that migratory birds themselves are the primary cause of bird flu is strongly questioned by Thomas Krumenacker in the above-mentioned article.
As he describes, the H5N1 strain first appeared almost 30 years ago in a poultry farm in southern China, where many ducks were kept in semi-wild free-range conditions in a confined space. From there, the pathogen began its triumphant march around the globe. Since then, large outbreaks of the disease with mass deaths among wild bird species and in poultry farms have paved its way. Hundreds of millions of birds have already fallen victim to the pathogen.
Experts attribute the fact that cranes are now dying in particular to the fact that water birds such as ducks and geese, which were particularly affected in previous waves, have built up a certain herd immunity. The viruses are still circulating among them and animals are still dying. However, many of them have developed antibodies against the virus as a result of past outbreaks.
We can only hope that also cranes will soon develop antibodies and that the expansion of suitable protected areas will reduce transmission rates again, allowing similar numbers of these “birds of happiness” to appear in the sky at sunrise.
