How do you manage that? An estimated 4 to 5 billion European migratory birds turn back our winter every year and embark on a wide and risky way to warm Africa. (Source: Chandra Patel). How do you manage that? An estimated 4 to 5 billion European migratory birds turn back our winter every year and embark on a wide and risky way to warm Africa. A pleasant climate and food galore attract it. But on the up to 9 400 kilometre-long route daunting obstacles to confront them: only the Alps, then the Mediterranean and finally the with 9 million square kilometers largest desert on Earth, the Sahara desert. And after returning in the spring succeeds in many ways exactly to find the breeding place of the previous year: as barn swallows breed in the same stable despite a tour of 20 000 km each year. Researchers are the puzzles of the winter mass exodus of about a hundred bird species on the track for decades. It even radar reconnaissance is used, with whose help scientists who in Heights fluttering travelers at least distinguish between 1 300 and 1 700 meters to the human eye invisible through the night using their wing beat pattern after groups of different sizes.
So, migratory songbirds, birds of prey or waterfowl and their flight height can differ. Mostly looking for the birds of wind layers with a tail wind and can achieve this remarkable speeds. The fastest are waders, which reach to pace 70 under its own power. In Israel, the radar at a troop even tempo of 180 with a tailwind measured water birds. Others tackle more comfortable travel, such as the storks, which deal with the huge distance not flapping, but comfortably, but slow as glider pilots under the laws of thermal. While some species directly crossing the Alps on the broadband front train, curving to the majority of migratory birds the mountains East or West and taking longer routes across the Strait of Gibraltar or via the Balkans, Bosphorus, Israel and Egypt in Purchase, to get in the wintering areas south of the Sahara.