ROSH PINA, Israel (dpa) – Undeterred by the ongoing violence in the Middle East, they are almost the only foreign winter holidaymakers around, turning the muddy, green field into a sea of black and grey dots, before forming large clouds as they rise up en masse, only to land a few metres further on.
Northern Israel’s Hula Valley has been taken over by thousands of cranes, which act as if they have owned the land for ever, strutting proudly while their long necks bob elegantly and their squeaking beaks emit a deafening cacophony.But the cranes discovered the valley by the thousands only several years ago, when Israel’s worsening water shortage forced local farmers to switch from cultivating water-demanding cotton to growing peanuts, which require much less liquid.Since the early 1990s more and more cranes passing through the Hula Valley en route to Africa for the winter have begun spending longer and longer periods of time there.Almost 30,000 arrived this fall, and around one third of them decided not to continue their journey, but to stay put for the winter.Israel is a major axis for many tracking birds en route from northern Europe and Asia to Africa. Rather than cross the Mediterranean Sea in one stretch, many birds prefer to fly over land, where they can rest and replenish their energy supplies.As a result, the Hula Valley, which covers an area of just 50 square kilometres, has 390 bird species – more than a country like Germany, which is 360,000 square kilometres large and has 258. In all of Israel, there are 501 bird species.Unlike other birds, cranes cannot float on spirals of warm air called thermals, because their wings are not wide enough in relation to their bodies. They have to use muscle power almost all the way through their long journey to the south.In order to fly an average of 400 kilometres on days they track, which are usually followed by several days of rest, the cranes have to consume huge amounts of wheat, chickpeas, corn, insects or amphibians.But the five-kilogramme birds need to consume only 250 grammes of the fatty peanuts per day, which works out at 1,500 kilocalories. For a human weighing ten times as much, that would be the equivalent of consuming 15,000 kilocalories in just one day. On a resting day, the cranes eat less than 100 grammes of peanuts.The problem – from the farmers’ point of view – is that the large number of cranes caused massive damage to their fields.“If we had 24 plants on a square metre, the birds would come and eat everything in the blink of an eye, leaving maybe only three plants,” says farmer Eli Galili.He points out that the damage to all the farmers totalled some 1.5 million Israeli Shekels (around 360,000 U.S. dollars) each winter.The farmers tried everything to scare off the birds. Some used fireworks, another drove around his field all winter with a trumpet blaring from his truck. But even the most creative solutions succeeded only in moving the cranes temporarily from one farmer’s field to another.“There were farmers who wanted to put down poison,” Galili says.Finally, the farmers, together with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), managed to restrict the cranes to a limited area, by feeding them 3000 kilogrammes of corn a day in a field set aside for the purpose, at a cost of some 200,000 dollars a winter.It took the cranes a while to understand they are better off in that area, where they are being fed, says ornithologist Dan Alon.He says this winter is the third since the project got underway and calls it a “great success”.The large concentration of birds has also encouraged a kind of eco-tourism which is growing in popularity – birdwatching.The recent Jewish Hanukah holiday saw scores of Israelis visit a new bird-watching site in the Hula, which the SPNI constructed only last month.“We hope the tourists will bring money to the locals and they will then have an interest in preserving the Hula,” says Alon.The Hula, once the most important wetland in the Middle East, consisting entirely of swamps and a lake, was drained in the 1950s. The Israelis dug two long channels to divert the water to the Sea of Galilee on the valley’s south, and to make the area, plagued also by mosquitos and malaria, suitable for agrigulture.Alon attached a tiny satellite transmitter to several cranes, which sent him an email every 90 minutes, telling him exactly where they were. His research found that most of them come from north-west Asia. One crane, Carolina, came all the way from Arkhangelsk in northern Russia, on the White Sea, and spent all winter in Israel. On her longest flight, she flew 800 kilometres in one day.By tracking them, researchers have also found that crane couples stay together all their lives. They nest each spring in the north and in the fall make the journey southwards with their youngters. At the end of the winter, the grown chicks go their own way, but the couple returns northwards together, to make a new nest once again.
