THE CONTROL OF NATURE - HELICOPTER PARENTS

The daring attempts to teach an endangered ibis species to migrate.

- NICK PAUMGARTEN

The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption as much pendulum as planereared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit.

The birds, three dozen in all, were members of a species called the northern bald ibis: funny-looking, totemic, nearly extinct. The humans were a team of scientists and volunteers, Austrians and Germans, mostly, who had dedicated the next two months, or in some cases their lives, to the task of reintroducing these birds to the wild in Europe, four centuries after they disappeared from the continent. The woman with the bullhorn was Barbara Steininger, or Babsi, one of the birds' two foster mothers, who had handraised them since their hatching, four months before. The pilot was the project leader, Johannes Fritz, a fifty-seven-yearold scientist and Pied Piper. Almost every August for the past twenty years, he has led a flock of juveniles on a fall migration, to teach them how, and where, to travel. This was this flock's first day on the move. They had seven weeks and seventeen hundred miles to go until, assuming more miracles, they would reach wintering grounds on the southern coast of Spain.

I caught up with the migration in the Spanish countryside twenty-two days later. I'd been invited along by a group of documentary filmmakers, whose ef fort to shoot this undertaking was perhaps as cracked as the migration itself, as they tried to film creatures they were forbidden to approach.