Baby boom of storks in Amur region

We are all familiar with how new babies arrive - storks fly over the rooftops delivering the little bundles to happy parents. This account goes back deep in time, but modern conservationists are hailing the latest successes of the bird near the Amur River.

A drone purchased by the Russian Wildlife Fund with financial support HSBC bank in neighbouring China detected a definite baby boom - of storks, says local WWF spokeswoman Elena Starostina. The drone opens the possibility of peering into the nests of storks high on power line poles, for example. 

'The last time I saw six eggs in a stork nest was about 30 years ago after a major flood,' said the director of the Amur Branch of WWF Russia, noted ecologist Yuri Darman. 'And now again Amur spilled water into the valleys, poured fresh water into the lakes, filled the riverbeds. The storks once again have the hope of a bright future.'

He speculated: 'More storks means more children in Russian families along the great Amur river.'

The scientists hope to measure the success of breeding by counting the number of eggs and comparing it with the number of chicks.

Another expert Yuri Gafarov, director of the Amur regional public environmental organisation 'AmurSoES', said: 'First results show that  to study nests by drone takes less time than by humans. The important thing is that the drone operates from a distance of 200-300 metres which doesn't scare the birds in the way people do.

'In fact, storks fly away only at the moment when the drone flies directly over the nest, and then return immediately after the drone leaves.'