Great spectacle in the sky over Hesse: cranes are coming back in droves from their winter quarters.
"Several thousand cranes have already migrated through Hesse in the last few days," reported Gerhard Eppler, the state chairman of the Nature Conservation Union (Nabu) Hesse, on Thursday in Wetzlar.
The nature lovers expect that in the next few weeks up to 250,000 of the trumpeting migratory birds will pass over Hesse on their way back to their breeding grounds in eastern Germany and northern Europe.
The Nabu called for crane observations to be reported online on the website www.kranich-hessen.de.
There you can also call up all previous crane observations of the year.
Hesse lies on one of the main flight routes of cranes on their way from their winter quarters in northern France and Spain to the far north.
The birds mainly migrate along the Rhine plain and further across central and eastern Hesse in the direction of the Weser, as the Nabu further announced.
When the weather is bad, the animals on their migration sometimes go to rest areas in Hesse to relax and eat something.
“You should keep a distance of 300 meters at rest areas so as not to worry exhausted animals unnecessarily,” says Eppler.
Typical resting areas for cranes in Hesse are the floodplains of the Rhine and Main, the Wetterau and the river valleys of the Werra, Fulda, Lahn and Eder.