One day same as the other (Kluchiki, Monday, June 28, 2004)

We are after Iristu for five days now at the southern Novosibirsk area to take off his non-functional satellite transmitter. We have seen him many times but would not find his nest. If it eve exists. Iristu flies over from Zaobi to "our" side of Ob, where storks nest, two or three times a day. We agreed that he feeds the chicks and we thought from the start that it would not be a problem to find his nest. But Iristu flies slightly different direction each time and most the time circles in heights. My notepad is scrawled all over with maps of Iristu's signal directions (the terrestrial one, satelliete transmitter does not work for a long time); each line means hours of jolting in a Jeep, waiting in amongst mosquitoes and walking through not arranged endless forests. Now it is clear that if Iristu flies to his nest, he stays there only a minute just to throw out the food. But we are more close to thinking that he lost his nest and now flies over the left bank of Ob through inertia or to fly around with other storks. We know for sure that there were cases he flew to quite different places... It looks like we will fail to catch him even if we are going to monitor him or two more days.