The incident occurred on the farm of Sabine Kleinert in Klein Lobke, a district of Seelze in the Hanover region. “The two adult storks tried to prevent it, but they had no chance,” Kleinert told the German news agency dpa. “We were devastated.”
According to NABU, griffon vultures are currently circling over Germany. Since last weekend, “more than a dozen of the large scavengers” have flown in, observed in the Karwendel Mountains, on Ammersee, in the Stuttgart area, on Edersee, in Saxony, Thuringia, near Hanover, in the Prignitz region, and near Segeberg. The birds most likely originate from Spain or France, as NABU bird expert Martin Rümmler stated.
NABU press spokesman Helge May described the attack as “absolutely extraordinary.” Normally, griffon vultures feed on carrion. A similar case was recently reported from France, where a griffon vulture snatched nearly fledged stork chicks from a nest. Local ornithologists suspected the nest had already been abandoned – Kleinert contradicted that: “The white storks cared for their offspring until the very end. And then the vulture came.”
Source: www.spiegel.de
