A nest in Prelluzhë
Prelluzhë is a village in Vushtrri municipality, north of Pristina. Paqe and Ana hatched no later than mid-May 2017, in a nest with three chicks; Paqe was the elder of the two that were tagged. On 5 July the German ornithologist Wolfgang Fiedler and the students on a course fitted each with a 50-gram solar-powered logger that sends its positions over the mobile phone network.
“Paqe” is Albanian for peace, from the Latin pax. On 20 July, on the same morning and an hour and 40 minutes apart, the sisters went more than a kilometre from the nest for the first time.
They left four days apart
Ana left first: by 11:15 on 15 August 2017 she was already more than 50 kilometres from the nest, and that night she slept in Serbia. Paqe was that far from the nest by 12:35 on 19 August 2017, four days later. Ana went through Serbia and Bulgaria, Paqe through Serbia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria; both then crossed a corner of Greece into Turkey.
Storks travel by soaring: they climb in columns of warm air rising from hot ground, then glide to the next one. No such columns form over the sea, so they avoid water. Ana crossed the Sea of Marmara all the same, on 20 August 2017: between 09:30 and 11:55, most of her positions are over the water.
Through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon or Jordan, Israel and Sinai to Sudan
From Turkey both went south through the Levant, away from the coast: Ana through Syria and Lebanon, Paqe through Syria, past Damascus, and Jordan. They crossed southern Israel into Sinai, flew over the Gulf of Suez and followed the Nile south. Ana reached Sudan on 29 August, Paqe on 31 August, on a day she flew 463 km.
Six weeks later, in the same region
In September both stopped in eastern Sudan, in Kassala state, each arriving by her own road. On 22 September 2017, at about half past two in the afternoon, Paqe landed beside Ana; at 14:35 they were 45 metres apart. On 27 September 2017, at 11:20, their loggers were 27 metres apart, both on the ground.
In September and October they were less than a kilometre apart on 10 days, but on most days they were tens of kilometres apart: in the same region, not together. To see whether such closeness also turns up by chance, Ana's track was shifted by one to fifteen days, forwards and back. In the shifted versions the two come within a kilometre on at most 5 days, not 10, and never within 50 metres.
Whether they recognised each other cannot be known. The loggers say only where each one was.
Twenty-seven metres
This is the place, in a 2016 satellite image: a plain in Kassala state, some 70 km north-north-west of the town of New Halfa. The orange dots are Paqe's positions on 27 September 2017, the blue ones Ana's.
Winter, over the Ethiopian mountains and on to Tanzania
In November Paqe crossed the Ethiopian highlands. On 20 November 2017 she climbed to 4,147 metres above sea level, the highest reliable height her logger recorded, 2,384 metres above the mountains. Ana went through Eritrea and Ethiopia; in December she too climbed above 4,500 metres.
On 21 December 2017, in northern Kenya, the sisters were close again: 390 metres. After New Year both were in Tanzania, but in different places; they stayed there until the third week of March.
North, in spring
Around 22 March 2018 both set off north. Paqe flew almost without a break as far as Sudan and stayed there until mid-April; Ana spent two weeks in southern Kenya and set off again on 9 April. Further north their roads ran nearly parallel. In Israel and on the Lebanese border, between 29 April and 13 May, the smallest distance between them each day was between 21 km and 72 km. Then Paqe flew on and by 14 May was in Turkey, while Ana stayed a few days in Lebanon and went on into Syria.
Ana, in northern Syria
On 26 May 2018 Ana stopped near Afrin, in north-western Syria. Her logger did not move again. The project's record says she died on 27 May and that the logger's motion sensor “shows hunting or predation event”. The logger went on sending positions from the same spot; the published data end on 31 July.
Storks are shot along this route. In Lebanon, of 77 rings from white storks found and reported, 75.3% came from birds confirmed as shot, according to a 2021 study.
Paqe's summer, in Romania
Paqe was just over a year old. She spent May and June in Turkey, then flew up through Bulgaria and on 11 July 2018 crossed the Danube into Romania's Călărași county near Ciocănești; she spent her first night near Nicolae Bălcescu. She stayed 33 days.
In the first days she flew north, to around Ploiești, then west into Dâmbovița county.
Six days at the rubbish dump outside Bucharest
From 16 to 21 July Paqe stayed on the western edge of Bucharest, near the village of Rudeni. Between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., 39% of her positions fall inside the outline OpenStreetMap draws for the IRIDEX landfill at Chiajna. At night she slept less than a kilometre away. Storks feed at rubbish dumps: in Flack and colleagues' 2016 study, four of the six storks from south-west Germany that lived at least five months spent the winter at dumps in Morocco.
Two and a half weeks near the Danube
On 22 July she headed south, and from 25 July to 11 August she stayed on the plain by the Danube, between Giurgiu and Teleorman counties, usually about 10 kilometres from the river: around the villages of Găujani, Pietrișu, Izvoru, Bujoru and Cervenia. On 12 August she crossed the Danube back into Bulgaria and headed south.
The second autumn
On 26 August 2018, over the desert of southern Egypt, she flew 515 km in a single day, the longest of her life. She reached Sudan on 27 August, went through South Sudan and Ethiopia, spent December in Kenya and on 11 January 2019 entered Tanzania.
The last day
On 22 January 2019, in central Tanzania, Paqe flew 64 km. At 15:00 she climbed to 2,257 metres. The last valid position is from 22:00, at the place where she had settled for the night. The project's record says only that she died that day, of unknown causes.
Her logger followed her for 567 days and recorded 122,097 valid positions and, added up, the distances between them come to more than 46,000 km, more than once round the Earth. She passed through 20 countries and territories.
The other six storks from Kosovo
From 2016 to 2018 the project fitted loggers to eight stork chicks from three nests in Kosovo. None was tracked to the age of two. Seven died, and one vanished:
- Alban, Agron and Besi: three brothers from one nest near Lipjan, tagged in 2016. Alban died in western Turkey on 4 September 2016, and his logger was then carried by a person for a long time. Besi and Agron were “presumably hunted” in Sudan in November and December 2016; Agron's logger was taken into a house.
- Lean, Lumbardha and Drin: three siblings from the village of Pobërgjë, tagged in 2018. Lumbardha died in Egypt around 2 September 2018, and her logger was found two years later. Drin died in January 2019 in Tanzania's Mbeya region. Lean vanished on 4 February 2019 near Dodoma, Tanzania; until then his few positions showed normal movement.
Eight birds are too few to say how long storks from Kosovo live. A larger study, of 70 stork chicks tagged in eight countries, found 21 still alive after a year, or 30%. Of the ten from Greece, the population nearest to Kosovo, two were alive.