A group of storks migrating to Africa reached Vlaha on the evening of Friday 11 August. Unfortunately, the journey for one stork only lasted so long.
The stork arrived in the village at around 8.20 pm. Miska, who had guarded the web-cam monitored nest alone for a few days, bill clattered loudly, but then, seeing the overwhelming numbers, did not object to the landing of the arrivals. The flock could have consisted of 90-100 storks ( we took a picture with 67 of them visible). They swarmed over the roofs of the surrounding houses, the electricity poles, and the towers and ridges of the two churches.
At 8.37pm, an explosion was heard from the direction of the Reformed Church, causing a sudden power cut. The internet service was also down for about half an hour, so the camera was unable to broadcast images from the nest.
Unfortunately, our suspicions that the noise was caused by a unlucky stork were confirmed. It attempted to land on a medium-voltage power line pole that ran through the Reformed churchyard and was electrocuted. Its carcass was found at the base of the pole.
We identified several ringed storks in the photographs taken of the passers-by. There were also four ringed storks in the nest. Two of them had green rings, one had a black ring and one had a yellowish ring. For the moment we have not been able to read the numbers, but we are not giving up.
The green rings look like those of a passing stork photographed on the tower knob of the Reformed Church in August 2021. It was later identified and reported. The Polish Ornithological Station Museum and Institute in Gdansk thanked for the information and said that the stork with green ring T6649 was ringed in Podczerwone, near the Polish-Slovak border, in the same year.
The stork team that spent the night in Vlaha did not spend any more time in the village this year. They got up at dawn and continued their journey south. In the meantime, we arranged to hand over the electrocuted stork carcass to the Babes-Bolyai University for scientific purposes.