BRACING FOR A PANDEMIC: Early-warning system for bird flu
Experts track flocks' flight patterns for clues on disease's course
Sunday, March 12, 2006, by Matthew Kalman

Tel Aviv -- In a nondescript corner of an anonymous administration building on the campus of Tel Aviv University, Yossi Leshem has been using the latest satellite technology to track the movements of a couple code-named Princess and Jonas.

For nearly a year, Israeli experts were able to track the pair as they left their adopted home in Germany and set out on their travels. Jonas traversed Europe to southern Spain, where he spent several months before rejoining his partner back in Germany. Princess journeyed east, across Turkey and Lebanon, passing through Israel, the Palestinian territories and Egypt before making a long stopover in Sudan. She then continued on to South Africa, returning to rendezvous with Jonas in Germany 235 days later.

For more than five years, Leshem has been tracking the travels of Princess and Jonas and dozens like them. He worries that their apparently benign wanderings could inflict death and devastation across the world, at a cost of untold numbers of human lives.

Princess and Jonas are birds -- white storks, the long-legged waterfowl that nest in Europe during the summer and migrate south for the winter. The feathery pair are among an estimated half billion fowl who fly over Israel twice a year, on their way to and from their nesting grounds.