A few days ago, to much fanfare and ado, Punxatawney Phil "predicted" that there would be six more weeks of winter, at least in the USA. While this news was received with no small disbelief in the USA, which is having one of its warmest and mildest winters on record, it is no news at all to those of us freezing off various extremities in Central Europe right now. Still, we here in Central Europe are much better off than our neighbors to the east.
But it seems that Phil's forecast has now been given additional credence, just in case we needed it, by Max the Stork, the inadvertent, if beloved, weather guru for the Swiss. Max is a female stork ostensibly named for the Swiss conservationist Max Bloesch, although her name incidentally also reflects the first name of the founder of the German-based Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (MPIO). The MPIO has been watching the movements of white storks for more than 100 years and tracking their flights since 1991. Whichever namesake applies, Max the Stork has abruptly stopped her flight northward and is biding her time in Catalonia, northern Spain. She shows no signs of moving on anytime soon. Max is no dummy.
White storks are long-distance migrants that are found in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. The MPIO's satellite-tracking and bird-banding programs have allowed ornithologists to follow the movements of individual birds with greater accuracy so as better to understand how population movements change in response to environmental conditions. For more information on migration movements generally, see Movebank.
Max has been a regular seasonal feature in the English-language website Geneva Lunch, such as here where she is pictured and described while raising her three chicks from 2011. Max, going on for 13 years old, has been banded and tracked longer than any bird in the world. She migrates each fall to either southern Spain or northern Morocco and returns to the Swiss-German border area, Tuefingen, on the north coast of Lake Constance, to mate and raise her young. Counting her 2011 family, she has produced 26 offspring within nine years.
Max herself is a Swiss national, having been born in Avenches in 1999. The Museum of Natural History in Fribourg also tracks her movements (Max la Cigogne) on behalf of her ever-increasing fan club. She has also been immortalized in a book, A Stork Named Max - Life Is No Frog Buffet, which I have so far been unable to find on Amazon for my grandchildren, who are all voracious readers, thank heavens. But I will continue to look for it.
In the meantime, here is the link to a YouTube depiction of Max's flights over the first three years. Here is another showing how the batteries on her transmitter, once exhausted, get replaced. Happy flying, Max, we hope that you will be able to come home soon and bring some warmer weather with you!
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