Strange... (Monday 4th November 2002)
The male called Petr started off on Friday again. He flew over 200 kilometers and spent the night deep in the Afghanistan inland. Everything ok so far; it’s high time the birds got ready for a trip to the winter grounds. But after I downloaded new data this morning, I found that Petr got back along identical trace during Saturday and Sunday to almost the same place in Turkmenistan from where he started on Friday. What is happening? Petr’s behavior is very strange even if it has a precedent: the stork Krystof also got back several hundreds of kilometers from Sahara to the High Atlas Mountains – the cause if his return was a sand storm. Perhaps Petr faced something similar...
The next one, Roman, changed his direction eastward across Turkmenistan on Friday. His satellite transmitter went down to a rare activity cycle and that’s why we don’t have the current coordinates. Katerina is still at the same place in northwest China.
NOTE: Apart from the textual information, the storks’ coordinates are updates several times per day (see the icon and the note above this article). This way you can watch the storks’ trace almost online...