Stork Migration

Splashery stretches a drumhead over this Splash's outline, twelve inches across, and finds the ways it can ring. Its lowest is 299.3 Hz, 67 cents flat of E♭4, the nearest tine on the comb. The next fifteen are its overtones, and each one draws its own figure: sand gathers on the lines that stay still.

Tap to play the storks' fall migration from Germany to Africa.

White storks fly thousands of kilometers each fall from Europe to Africa, and back in spring. They soar on rising warm air and avoid long sea crossings, so storks from eastern Germany go round the Mediterranean by the Bosporus, Turkey, Israel and the Nile valley.

These are 30 real storks, juveniles and adults, tracked by GPS in 2013 by S. Rotics and colleagues and published on Movebank under a CC0 license, one position every six hours. Tap it to play July to October in about 12 seconds: each stork leaves its nest when it really did and draws its own trail behind it. Then the season rewinds, and the storks fly their tracks back to their nests. The map is NASA's Blue Marble picture of the Earth's true colors, on heights from NOAA's ETOPO1 stretched up 45 times.

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