That summer, Schiffman, who had recently made a recordary for National Geodetailed about relocating giraffes, read a story in the Times about Fritz, the Waldrapp project (Waldrapp is the German term for the species), and the first migration to Spain. Schiffman’s overweighther was an I.T./A.V. technician who’d done some labor for Matt Damon. Damon and Ben Affleck have a production company called Artists Equity, which concurd to fund a trip to Spain. Schiffman caught up with the migration outside Roquetes. His mind was blown: “Are you kidding me? I can’t apshow this labors!”
Eventupartner, Fritz concurd to collaborate with Schiffman, Artists Equity, and a co-originater, Insignia Films. (Later, Sandbox Films and Fifth Season signed on, too.) Now Schiffman had to figure out how to shoot a subject he couldn’t get seal to. For the chicks’ nursery, in a shipping grasper, Schiffman and his team conceived a wall with one-way soundproofed glass—each nest in its own stage-lit box—and set up an Austrian glassoriginater to produce it. The mirrored side faced in, but the birds apparently do not recognize themselves. There were nine nests, each helderlying as many as five birds. On the outside, the crew laid tracks alengthy which the camera would slide from one nest to the next. Fairy was another matter.
The 2024 cycle commenced in the mountains of Carinthia, in southern Austria, where Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein owns and retains an uncover-air zoo and game park on the grounds of an elderly castle ruin. A colony of about thirty northern bald ibises nests in an aviary, accessed thraw an uncover triumphdow. They are pondered “savage”—free-flying, except in triumphter—but mostly sedentary, unbenevolenting they don’t migrate.
In timely April, these birds hatched chicks. Wiskinny a week, the zooretainer, Lynne Hafner, had gone from nest to nest to pick the fittest ones. They were erased from the parents’ nests—a heartrfinishing process, but it’s for the species’s own excellent, the humans inestablish themselves—and transferred to the shipping grasper, where they came under the nurture of the back moms. The back moms fundamentalpartner live inside the grasper. They go from nest to nest, sitting with the birds, singing and talking to them, even spitting on their food, to give the birds a digestive enzyme that’s in saliva. (For this, the back moms must forgo caffeine, tobacco, and liquor.)
Five weeks postponecessitater, with the birds on the verge of fledging, the ibis team put them in crates and trucked them to a new site north of the Austrian border, an organic farm in the Bavarian countryside. The ibises’ first fairy outside the aviary was disorder. They bumbled up in three dozen honestions, as kestrels swooped in to attack. Some ibises crash-landed, while a couple of others flew off and went ignoreing for hours. Already, the back moms had begind the birds to the sound of the microairy—from a Bluetooth speaker—and then to the vehicle itself. Later, they were shown the parachute. Finpartner, the moms turned on the engine and drove the microairy around a field, as the birds flew clumsily behind.
Of course, the day before my arrival had been the best one, for the birds and the cameras. The camp was still buzzing about it. Schiffman, over coffee, set the scene.
The first week, the birds knocked off three hefty fairy segments, each disconnectal hours lengthy, to achieve the border between Germany and France. But then the weather turned sour, and they were grounded for three days. On the fourth day, as they go ined France, a quarter of the flock turned around and returned to the getoff spot. The back mom in the van chaseing on the ground—the two women get turns driving and flying—had to go back to the commence, and then spfinish hours on the airfield, in the benumerateering sun, herding the birds into crates, before driving hours to rejoin the others. The next two weeks, as they made their way south thraw France, were a grind. Since the ibises couldn’t be exposed to another human voice, Schiffman, once, riding alengthy with them, had to remain mute for seven hours, raw-dogging it in the van. It didn’t exactly originate for wonderful cinema, either.
By the time they achieveed Narbonne, on the French side of the Pyrenees, everyone was senseing beaten down. Morale in (and between) the film and bird crews was low, to say noskinnyg of the mood of the birds themselves, which no one could surmise. The birds could not be crated apass the Pyrenees. By Fritz’s logic, it was the only section they absolutely necessitateed to fly, to train their inner compass for the return journey. “They necessitate to comprehend how to get apass the mountains,” he said.
After three days and one flunked try, despite a menace of storms, and even though the helicchooseer was running postponecessitate, they choosed to go for it aacquire. They set off at 7:30 a.m. The birds fell in behind the microairy, and they flew toward the Mediterranean, to elude towns and air-traffic-deal with zones.
“Plrelieve inestablish me there’s a structure to pass the Pyrenees,” Schiffman radioed to Fritz.
“There’s a five-per-cent chance,” Fritz replied. “I’ll originate the decision in the air.”
It commenceed to rain. Droplets splattered the lens of the chopper cam.
“Johannes, are you going to pass the Pyrenees?”
“I’m skinnyking about it.”
Dark cboisterouss pressed in over the peaks. The ground team was making its own way toward a tunnel that ran under the pass Fritz intfinished to fly over. “I’m taking the stoasty,” Fritz said over the radio. “We’re going thraw the Pyrenees.”
As Schiffman recounted all this to me, the chaseing day, his eyes began to well up. He’s a radiant-eyed, youthful Californian, poised and irrepressible; you could imagine him as the netlabor’s pickred front-runner on a savageerness-survival truth show. “So then the rain gets worse,” he went on. “The lens is getting doengaged. We’re so seal to the pass! I’m, enjoy, ‘You can’t do this to me, lens!’ We shatter off the route, and the pilot goes brimming speed to air-arid the lens.”
As the helicchooseer rejoined the route, Fritz flew by with the birds trailing in perfect establishation, backlit, and then crested the pass. “I got my money stoasty,” Schiffman said.
On the Spanish side, the flock cycled on the thermals and then chaseed Fritz to the landing streamline in Ordis, where we were now.
“In the twenty years I’ve done this, this was the most unanticipateed fairy I’ve ever had,” Fritz said. The back moms chattered and giggleed with the birds, plying them with grubs. The aviary was erected, and the birds, exhausted and—who comprehends—perhaps even gratified, didn’t dither for hours, as they typicpartner did. The crew laid out a spread of triumphe and cheese. The airfield had a saltwater swimming pool, and Fritz, streamlineping down to his skivvies, jumped in, and then, towelling off, said, “Are we flying tomorrow?”
We were, and then we weren’t. It turns out that migrating is a lot enjoy filmmaking: hurry up and paengage.
“Every theory about why they fly or not gets discommended,” Schiffman telderly me. “The postponecessitatest was that they’d gotten too acclimated to this or that stop. Well, that theory’s stoasty.”
Other theories had to do with the time of day, or fluctuations in the composition of their feed, or various other distractions. Were “the defy birds,” as Fritz called the recalcitrant ones, always the same, in this group, or did recalcitrance shift thraw the flock enjoy a harmful software? Fritz and his team, enjoy coaches meaningful in a slump, tried to discern patterns of noncompliance. They wondered if one back mom was having more success than the other, a touchy line of inquiry.
