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Apropos of the inter-species ‘teaching/education’ we’ve been speculating about lately, did anyone see a piece in the the Guardian (p.31) yesterday (21 July) about a research project in southern Germany concerned with re-introducing the northern bald ibis, a bird that has been extinct in the area for 300 years? 

An essential element in this is teaching juvenile birds how to make the winter annual migration over the Alps and south into Tuscany. Normally their mothers would teach them, but the only ‘mother’ these youngsters know is the woman who feeds them ten times a day. So how does she teach them? She gets into an ultralight aircraft and flies them over the Alps at the head of a v-formation. (About half of them are slower than others to recognise that she is in the aircraft so they fly back to the aviary to look for her; but they catch on eventually it seems.) 

About 100 birds are now living independently in the region and teach their own offspring the migratory route they learned from their human foster-parents.