Thousands of Migrating Cranes in the Sky 🇩🇪 (2024-10)

Bird watching in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia on a late afternoon in October.
From mid-October, in sunny weather with an easterly wind, thousands of cranes simultaneously head south from their gathering areas in northern Germany to their wintering grounds. Before this, the animals gather at frequently used main resting places. Cranes prefer to migrate during high pressure weather, as they are then carried along by the easterly winds and can thus save energy. On days with good weather, up to 50,000 or more birds can migrate over North Rhine-Westphalia in a short period of time. In the early morning hours, the flocks of cranes set off from their northern gathering places and fly past both sides of the Harz Mountains. The main migration flies over Osnabrück, Hanover and Göttingen, then reaches the Weserbergland, before flying on at 80 kilometers per hour past the eastern Ruhr region and along the Rhine to Bonn. A slightly more westerly migration route allows observations to be made on the Lower Rhine and in the Eifel. From here, the migration continues via the largest French resting place, the Lac du Der Chantecoq in Champagne, to the wintering areas in Spain and Portugal. The main migration of the cranes is completed by mid-November.

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