Max the stork, the grand old lady of Swiss bird research, has been found dead in Spain at the age of 13 and a half. No other animal in the world has been tracked by satellite over such a long period, experts say.
The museum of natural history in Fribourg, which had tracked her since she was two months old, said in a press statement on Thursday that by the time the body was found it had been half eaten, making it impossible to determine the exact cause of death.
However, since it was close to a power line, it is possible that she was electrocuted.
The museum suspected something was wrong when the tracking device showed no movement over several days.
Spanish ornithologists then went to the spot and found the corpse and the tracking device which was still working.
Unusual bird
Max proved an exceptional bird over her long life. According to the museum she held the record for the longest satellite tracking of an animal. She reached a very respectable age: only one in five storks in Switzerland even reaches sexual maturity. Starting at the age of three she produced 31 chicks – a success rate of 2.8 per year, far above the Swiss average of 1.7.
Max was born in May 1999 in Avenches, in western Switzerland, and fitted with the device in July. She spent her first eight winters in Morocco, and since then in Spain, either in Andalusia in the south, or near Madrid.
She bred for the first time in 2002 north of Lake Constance in Germany. It was only then that ornithologists realised that she was a female. She had been named after Max Bloesch who brought storks back to Switzerland after they had died out in 1950.
She provided ornithologists with a mass of interesting information about the migration of white storks. Each year they learned when she started migration, her route, the length of time spent migrating and the speed achieved, when she arrived and when she started back, and whether she changed strategy from one year to the next.
Max usually flew between 100 and 300 kilometres a day when migrating. With favourable winds this could reach 400, and very occasionally more than 500. Over her lifetime she flew more than 60,000.
She was very well known in Switzerland. The museum issued a newsletter to enable people to follow her progress, and children’s author Katja Alves published an “autobiography” about her to mark her tenth birthday.