150 years ago, bird experts had to examine the tips of arrows storks carried back with them from Africa to determine where they had spent the winter. Nowadays, tiny, high-tech transmitters attached to the birds register every movement of their flight and relay their GPS coordinates. Scientists can access a wealth of new data, including altitude, speed, air resistance and energy consumption, concerning bird migration. For Martin Wikelski, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, a new era has dawned. “By studying birds’ flight,” he says, “we can discover how the world is changing at any given location.”

But researchers still have a long way to go. As Konrad Lorenz found out, grey geese chicks can be accustomed to human beings, so they’re the ones enlisted to help calibrate the first generation of data transmitters. Only if the sensors measurements are precise, will future scientists be able to unravel the mysteries of bird flight and better understood everything from local wind conditions, catastrophic storms, incipient earthquakes and locust plagues. When birds change their flight routes, there’s always a reason. Swifts, for example, sense storms from 600 kilometers away. They can also sleep while flying, which allows them to spend days and even weeks aloft.

“Migrating Birds - Scouts Of Distant Worlds” uses both extensive CGI animation sequences and breathtaking aerial footage to illustrate birds’ migration from Europe to Africa. The film tags along with goslings as they discover the adventure of flying – in the service of science. Despite all the groundbreaking discoveries of recent years, we still don’t completely understand how birds find their way. “There are a couple of really burning questions,” says ornithologist Peter Berthold, Wikelski’s predecessor in Radolfzell. “Maybe someday the result will be a Nobel Prize.”