That summer, Schiffman, who had recently made a documentary for National Geographic 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 father was an I.T./A.V. technician who’d done some work for Matt Damon. Damon and Ben Affleck have a production company called Artists Equity, which agreed 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 believe this works!”
Eventually, Fritz agreed to collaborate with Schiffman, Artists Equity, and a co-producer, 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 close to. For the chicks’ nursery, in a shipping container, Schiffman and his team devised a wall with one-way soundproofed glass—each nest in its own stage-lit box—and found an Austrian glassmaker to fabricate it. The mirrored side faced in, but the birds apparently do not recognize themselves. There were nine nests, each holding as many as five birds. On the outside, the crew laid tracks along which the camera would slide from one nest to the next. Flight was another matter.
The 2024 cycle commenced in the mountains of Carinthia, in southern Austria, where Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein owns and maintains an open-air zoo and game park on the grounds of an old castle ruin. A colony of about thirty northern bald ibises nests in an aviary, accessed through an open window. They are considered “wild”—free-flying, except in winter—but mostly sedentary, meaning they don’t migrate.
In early April, these birds hatched chicks. Within a week, the zookeeper, Lynne Hafner, had gone from nest to nest to select the fittest ones. They were removed from the parents’ nests—a heartrending process, but it’s for the species’s own good, the humans tell themselves—and transferred to the shipping container, where they came under the care of the foster moms. The foster moms basically live inside the container. 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 foster moms must forgo caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol.)
“Your mom packs the best lunches.”
Cartoon by Amy Hwang
Five weeks later, 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 flight outside the aviary was chaos. They bumbled up in three dozen directions, as kestrels swooped in to attack. Some ibises crash-landed, while a couple of others flew off and went missing for hours. Already, the foster moms had introduced the birds to the sound of the microlight—from a Bluetooth speaker—and then to the vehicle itself. Later, they were shown the parachute. Finally, the moms turned on the engine and drove the microlight 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 flight segments, each several hours long, to reach 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 entered France, a quarter of the flock turned around and returned to the takeoff spot. The foster mom in the van following on the ground—the two women take turns driving and flying—had to go back to the start, and then spend hours on the airfield, in the blistering sun, herding the birds into crates, before driving hours to rejoin the others. The next two weeks, as they made their way south through France, were a grind. Since the ibises couldn’t be exposed to another human voice, Schiffman, once, riding along with them, had to remain silent for seven hours, raw-dogging it in the van. It didn’t exactly make for great cinema, either.
By the time they reached Narbonne, on the French side of the Pyrenees, everyone was feeling beaten down. Morale in (and between) the film and bird crews was low, to say nothing of the mood of the birds themselves, which no one could surmise. The birds could not be crated across the Pyrenees. By Fritz’s logic, it was the only section they absolutely needed to fly, to train their inner compass for the return journey. “They need to know how to get across the mountains,” he said.
After three days and one failed attempt, despite a threat of storms, and even though the helicopter was running late, they decided to go for it again. They set off at 7:30 a.m. The birds fell in behind the microlight, and they flew toward the Mediterranean, to avoid towns and air-traffic-control zones.
“Please tell me there’s a plan to cross the Pyrenees,” Schiffman radioed to Fritz.
“There’s a five-per-cent chance,” Fritz replied. “I’ll make the decision in the air.”
It started to rain. Droplets splattered the lens of the chopper cam.
“Johannes, are you going to cross the Pyrenees?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
Dark clouds pressed in over the peaks. The ground team was making its own way toward a tunnel that ran under the pass Fritz intended to fly over. “I’m taking the shot,” Fritz said over the radio. “We’re going through the Pyrenees.”
As Schiffman recounted all this to me, the following day, his eyes began to well up. He’s a bright-eyed, youthful Californian, poised and irrepressible; you could imagine him as the network’s preferred front-runner on a wilderness-survival reality show. “So then the rain gets worse,” he went on. “The lens is getting doused. We’re so close to the pass! I’m, like, ‘You can’t do this to me, lens!’ We break off the route, and the pilot goes full speed to air-dry the lens.”
As the helicopter rejoined the route, Fritz flew by with the birds trailing in perfect formation, backlit, and then crested the pass. “I got my money shot,” Schiffman said.
On the Spanish side, the flock cycled on the thermals and then followed Fritz to the landing strip in Ordis, where we were now.
“In the twenty years I’ve done this, this was the most unexpected flight I’ve ever had,” Fritz said. The foster moms chattered and laughed with the birds, plying them with grubs. The aviary was erected, and the birds, exhausted and—who knows—perhaps even gratified, didn’t dither for hours, as they typically did. The crew laid out a spread of wine and cheese. The airfield had a saltwater swimming pool, and Fritz, stripping 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 like filmmaking: hurry up and wait.
“Every theory about why they fly or not gets discredited,” Schiffman told me. “The latest was that they’d gotten too acclimated to this or that stop. Well, that theory’s shot.”
Other theories had to do with the time of day, or fluctuations in the composition of their feed, or various other distractions. Were “the rebel birds,” as Fritz called the recalcitrant ones, always the same, in this group, or did recalcitrance move through the flock like a virus? Fritz and his team, like coaches deep in a slump, tried to discern patterns of noncompliance. They wondered if one foster mom was having more success than the other, a touchy line of inquiry.
