White storks are iconic migratory birds making long journeys between European breeding grounds and African wintering areas. Their welfare along migration routes faces threats from electrocution, poisoning, and habitat loss.
White stork welfare along migration routes illustrates how the welfare of migratory animals extends across continental scales, requiring international coordination of conservation action. Individual storks electrocuted on power lines experience acute death or severe burn injuries from which many cannot recover, and the cumulative mortality from this single cause can be significant across populations where dangerous line configurations are prevalent. The locust poisoning issue represents a different welfare dynamic: storks feeding on insecticide-treated insects are poisoned through their natural foraging behavior, with mass mortality events in African wintering areas reported following locust control operations. The concentration of hundreds of thousands of storks at migration bottlenecks — the Bosphorus in Turkey, the Strait of Gibraltar — makes these locations simultaneously conservation-critical and welfare-vulnerable: a single threat operating at these concentration points affects a disproportionate fraction of the total population. Conservation successes including power line modification programs and the provision of artificial nesting platforms demonstrate that targeted interventions at identified welfare threat points can achieve meaningful population-level benefits.