The discomfort is clearly noticeable in the bird of prey.

With his beak wide open, he endures Reinhard Vohwinkel's gripping grip.

The bird expert routinely measures the length of the wings and checks the weight of the bird, which weighs just under one kilogram.

Then he receives a numbered steel ring from the Helgoland bird sanctuary responsible for Hesse, and then he is released back into the wild.

Oliver Bock

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis and for Wiesbaden.

  • Follow I follow

    Despite the abundance of food, he will not venture into the almost 4000 square meter transhipment hall for organic waste on the spacious site of the Dyckerhoffbruch municipal landfill site. "The black kite has an excellent short-term memory," says Vohwinkel. In the hall that morning he hung up nets together with Hubert Diry, in which as many black kites as possible should get entangled.

    There, the garbage trucks of the disposal companies unload the organic waste, which is temporarily stored and then transported on for recycling in large trucks.

    For many bird species this means a richly laid table.

    This is one of the reasons why the landfill is a refuge for birds.

    This was last confirmed three years ago by a survey of flora and fauna in the course of preparing a landfill expansion.

    At that time, no fewer than 66 bird species were found on the landfill, 41 of which even breed there.

    Blackbird and garden warbler are particularly dominant species.

    But around a third of the breeding birds are on the Red List of Endangered Species.

    Mice and rats to eat

    These include the bloodline and gray woodpecker, cuckoo, little owl and sand martin. The black kite is not an endangered species. It is difficult to ring it in order to find out more about its migratory movements, its distribution and its age. Usually the bird conservationists only succeed in doing this with not yet fully fledged young animals in the nest. It is different at the Dyckerhoffbruch landfill, where there is plenty of food, the Rhine and its floodplains are close by, the surrounding habitat is of high quality and the peace and quiet at certain times of the day is great.

    Not only food leftovers attract visitors in the hall, but also mice and rats.

    This also seduces the black kite into prey flights.

    Vohwinkel and Diry catch more than 20 of the animals on a Saturday morning when the hall is closed.

    Then many adult birds also go into their nets.

    Like the guy who even wears a ring from 2017 and is apparently a regular in the hall.

    It will also be measured and will be allowed to fly again.

    Ringed almost a hundred animals

    The oldest ring bird found in the wild is said to have been 24 years old. But almost half do not survive the first year of life. Kites are long-distance migrants who usually overwinter in Africa and only stay in Germany for a comparatively short time. So the time window for the bird conservationists is small. The “by-catches” in the hall, such as a carrion crow and a rook, are also ringed. Your ring with the consecutive numbering is made of lightweight aluminum and you don't have to weigh and measure. Storks also occasionally go online.

    More than 90 of the actually rather brownish black kites have already been ringed on the landfill in the past few years.

    After that, the ornithological station has to rely on the ring numbers of found animals being discovered and reported in order to draw conclusions.

    A small GPS transmitter would be more meaningful, but according to Vohwinkel it is far too expensive for this purpose at around 2000 euros.

    It is different with the turkey vulture in North America, for example.

    It is a kind of early warning system and leaves the coast around 48 hours before a hurricane hits.

    The widespread Milan does not have such praiseworthy qualities.

    But according to Vohwinkel, it feels particularly at home in the region between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt: This is where its main area of ​​distribution is in Hesse.