The White Stork Project aims to re-establish a population of at least 50 breeding pairs of white storks in the south of England by 2030. Before 2020, it had been over 600 years since white storks were last recorded to have bred in the UK, which is widely thought to be because of persecution and habitat loss.

Since the first successful breeding attempts in 2020, the population has gone from strength to strength - 2022 was a bumper year, with twelve nests, 47 eggs laid and 20 chicks fledging successfully.

Juveniles are all ringed and whilst this ringing data can tell us a huge amount, there are some aspects to their behaviours and ecology which we need alternative solutions to be able to understand. One of these is to understand if they do decide to migrate south for the winter, where will they go?

To find this out we use satellite tags which collect GPS data, allowing us to determine home ranges, habitat choice, foraging strategies, distance moved per day and flight efficienty. This means that we can track migration success and routes of the juveniles we release and monitor the success of the reintroduction programme and understand migration behaviours.

The more tags we can buy, the more juveniles we can tag, the more data we can collect to improve the success of the reintroduction programme. Knowledge is power!