Martin Wikelski is the kind of guy who drives toward an earthquake. Last October, when a 6.1 devastated the Italian town of Visso, Wikelski was eating dinner with his wife, Uschi Müller, in the South German town of Konstanz, some 560 miles away. When he got the news from an online alert, he put down his fork and wine glass, grabbed his keys, and hopped into the family Volkswagen. He and his wife drove 12 hours over the Alps toward Visso, at one point navigating a destroyed mountain road.
Wikelski, 51, isn’t a seismologist or a Superman type. He’s the migration expert from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology—an animal tracker. He tests whether sharp changes in animal behavior, such as herd migration, can predict seismic and other events. In Visso, that meant taping 1/6th-ounce, solar-powered sensors on whatever creatures he could find and waiting for aftershocks to see if the animals anticipated them. A farmer whose farm had been badly hit let Wikelski rig up sensors on six cows, five sheep, pairs of dogs, chickens, and turkeys, and a rabbit.
