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Sept. 9, 2011
White pelican down!
Some think GPS-carrying birds are Israeli spies.
ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE
An urgent operation was necessary. A sophisticated transmitter with valuable data in its global positioning system (GPS) was lost somewhere along the Blue Nile and needed to be quietly retrieved and returned to the right hands in Israel. Since Israel and Sudan have no formal diplomatic relations, third parties were called in, and American and German figures were able get hold of the transmitter.
“We trapped and marked six great white pelicans with satellite GSM and GPS transmitters and wing tags,” explained Ohad Hatzofe, an avian ecologist for Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority (NPA). “It was used to monitor and better understand pelican movements.... None of it is for espionage, as sometimes we are accused of by our neighbors in the Middle East unfortunately.”
But one of the birds was trapped and died in a fisherman’s net in southern Sudan. The father of the fisherman retrieved the transmitter from its back. Instead of turning it over to authorities, he noticed a German e-mail address imprinted on the device and sent a message that they had found it.
Normally, tracking animals and birds for scientific purposes would not have required such sleuthing, but an increasing paranoia of Israeli zoological militancy conspiracy theories has made such incidents fodder for claims Israel is using wild animals to spy or attack people.
Last January, Saudi Arabia claimed to have detained a vulture for being a Mossad spy. Earlier, the south Sinai governor suggested that a shark that killed a tourist in Sharm el-Sheikh had been intentionally released by the Mossad to sabotage tourism in the area.
“Anyone who would use wild animals for spying is a world criminal because that would be the end of wild life,” Hatzofe said. “You could use wild animals to rescue people. I don’t know how, but maybe there is justification for that. But to use them for espionage? Well, we would be the last ones to do that.”
The great white pelican was declared a threatened species in 1992. Nearly 40,000 of them pass through Israel, a major bird migratory route linking Africa with Eurasia, twice a year. To better understand their migration patterns and behaviors, Israeli researchers from NPA teamed up with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany to put GPS tracking devices on them last December.
Two of the GPS-carrying pelicans died, one was badly wounded and one was lost, but the other two had been sending back data until recently. According to Hatzofe, one transmitted that it spent a few months in Lake Nasser near the Aswan Dam in Egypt and then made its way to central Turkey, revealing a previously unknown breeding ground.
Hatzofe was tracking the final bird, which spent the winter in southeast Sudan and occasionally crossed into Ethiopia.
“It started to move across the Blue Nile slowly in the summer. For some reason, this bird, a male, gave up the spring migration. We don’t know why,” he said, adding that he knew something was wrong when it started to transmit that it was going upstream and then it started to signal mortality. The bird had an Israeli band on its leg, but the transmitter was marked with a German address.
“Our colleague in Germany got an e-mail from a Sudanese guy, who informed him he got a bird with an Israeli ring, or band, and that’s how the contact was made,” Hatzofe said.
According to him, an American wildlife conservationist in Khartoum, who would not be named for fear of repercussions for having contact with Israelis, agreed to track down the fisherman, retrieve the transmitter kit and send it back to Israel via Germany.
The teams in Israel are anxiously awaiting its arrival because it holds an enormous amount of data that was not transmitted while the pelican was alive, including minute-by-minute details of its altitude, speed of flight, length of stay and precise positions.
Such data collection is what provides fodder for Arab propaganda that the Jewish state has no boundaries when it comes to collecting intelligence. Stories of animals used by a “Zionist plot” have appeared for years. In 2007, for example, Iran’s state-sponsored news agency reported that 14 squirrels working for the West had been arrested with spy gear. A year later, Iran announced it had nabbed two pigeons with “invisible strings” staking out a nuclear site in Natanz.
“We can be enemies or have disputes on water or borders or other issues, but birds and other wildlife belong to all of us and we have to cooperate,” Hatzofe said. “We actually do have cooperation across the borders with some colleagues in countries [with whom] we are technically enemies. Ignorance causes these stupid beliefs that they are used for spying.”
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