Already two Siberian storks have “backpacks” (Thursday 18 July 2002)
Yet yesterday evening, after we had marked the first Siberian stork, Nikolaj took us in his car to the second nest distant about 10 kilometers from our camp. It also resided on a pine and the three hatches are noticeably bigger than those in the first nest; they may be 5 weeks old.
Today morning we got back to the nest to catch and mark another stork. It did not take an hour before Franta held him in his arms! At the time we have got two Siberian Black Storks marked with satellite and terrestrial transmitters.
The third stork remains to be backpacked. Together with Nikolaj we’ll try to find the third nest. If we fail to, we’ll wait till the situation on the visited nests calms down and probably will try to catch a stork from one of them.
Our situation got complicated after Grisa had broken our car cooler. He tried to get over a tough part of our road the easy way – by driving as quickly as possible. Oh, well…
PS: Not even one Siberian stork has got a name. We dare not to determine their sex by weight and size (we could compare them to our storks which is impossible), so we’ll have to wait for the DNA analysis results.