LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Some birds need to be retaught to migrate.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Conservationists in Europe are trying to figure out how to do that with an endangered bird, the northern bald ibis. Johannes Fritz is one of them. He is a biologist based in Austria.
JOHANNES FRITZ: We were aware of the problem of these northern bald ibises, that they have a migration ability and migration motivation, but they lack the knowledge about the migration route because this is a social tradition which passes over the generations.
FADEL: Now, the northern bald ibis is a wading bird with a big red beak and a head that's free of feathers, and it's supposed to fly south for the winter to survive. But because the birds were hunted almost to extinction, they don't have any older birds around to teach them their ways.
FRITZ: So the social information was lost.
MARTIN: Fritz and his team got the idea about how to pass that information on - wait for it - from Hollywood.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: From the director of "The Black Stallion"...
JEFF DANIELS: (As Thomas Alden) Come in, mama goose.
ANNA PAQUIN: (As Amy Alden) Hello, papa goose.
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: ...Comes an incredible journey for anyone who's ever had a dream...
PAQUIN: (As Amy Alden) Dad, they're really flying with me.
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: ...And the courage to make it fly.
MARTIN: That's the trailer for the 1996 movie "Fly Away Home." In the film based on a true story, a girl and her dad teach her adopted geese to follow them as they fly a light aircraft along a migration route.
FADEL: So first this team decided to do the same thing - make people adoptive bird parents.
FRITZ: We take chicks out of nature for a few days - out of breeding colonies - and raise them by human foster parents, and so they are imprinted on humans.
FADEL: The birds learn to trust their human friends and follow them everywhere, even into the sky.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICROLIGHT ENGINE RUMBLING)
MARTIN: Fritz flies the ibises' trusted human on a microlight. It's basically a go-kart with a big fan on the back suspended under a giant kite.
FRITZ: This way we can lead the birds from breeding sites to the wintering sites, and there we release them. They keep this migration route in their memory, and as an adult bird, they start to migrate along this migration pathway.
FADEL: The team first taught the northern bald ibis to migrate to Italy more than 20 years ago, a journey of about 500 miles. But now climate change is threatening that route.
FRITZ: So the birds start later and later in the year. Because of ever-warmer and more extended warm periods, the birds hardly find thermals, which lift them up to flight levels to cross the mountain range, the Alps. And more and more birds fail to cross the Alps and would die there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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