VLADIVOSTOK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th October, 2020) Specialists at the Russian and Chinese chapters of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are jointly tracking the movements of two rare Far Eastern storks released into the wild after rehabilitation with the use of GPS transmitters.
According to the WWF branch in charge of monitoring wildlife reserves along the Amur river, two chicks of a rare Far Eastern stork were found in July 2020 in boxes on the side of a road in the Primorye region. They were taken to the Tiger Rehabilitation Center in an extremely weakened state and managed to rear the birds with great difficulty.
On August 13, Far Eastern storks were released in the south of the Jewish Autonomous Region, not far from the Russian-Chinese border. GPS-transmitters and rings with numbers that WWF-Russia were attached to the birds before they were released into the wild, a report from the WWF reads.
"Thanks to signals from GPS transmitters and movement tracks, we can tell exactly where our they are now. Almost immediately after release, both storks headed south from the territory of the Jewish Autonomous Region and spent almost a month in China in the Suibin Liangjiang Nature Reserve, located along the Songhua River," said Anna Serdyuk, senior coordinator of wildlife reserves projects of the Amur branch of WWF Russia.
The storks then separated, one remained in the Chinese nature reserve while the other flew back and has settled in Khabarovsk's Sheremetyevsky Natural Park, a known habitat for the storks, Serdyuk went on to say.
The Far Eastern stork is one of the rarest birds in the Russian Far East. It is endangered and is listed in Russia's Red Book. More than 80 percent of nests are located in the Amur basin, while outside of Russia, the bird nests in northeastern China, with a few in Japan and the Koreas. The storks winter in the plains of the Yangtze River in China. The birds were heavily hunted throughout history and the use of toxic DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) in the mid-20th Century brought their numbers dangerously close to extinction. The countries which serve provide a natural habitat for the species are now putting great efforts into seeing their numbers grow.
