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06/16/2010

The sheik from Qatar proved to be an exceedingly courteous man. He was traveling in Germany on business, he explained on the telephone, and wondered whether he could pay a visit at short notice. "I'm interested in a couple of your beautiful falcons," he said.

Hans Jürgen Küspert was forced to disappoint the caller. His falcon breeding business is regarded as the first port of call among Arab princes. The fine birds delight well-heeled customers from Arab states. In fact, many sheiks consider a shopping expedition to Küspert's "Falcon Center" in the northern German village of Helvesiek the highlight of their trip to Germany.

At the moment, though, the only residents of the 15-hectare (37-acre) site, secured with barbed wire and cameras, are Küspert and a couple of dogs. The falcons have fallen prey to a mysterious disease. "First the birds suffer extreme shortness of breath, then they fall to the ground dead," Küspert explains --hundreds of his falcons have met their untimely end this way. To save the population, Küspert and his brother transported the surviving stock to Spain, where they built an emergency shelter in the Pyrenees in 2003, out of fear over avian flu.

Green Mold

This time, the birds are being threatened not by a virus but by a green mold -- Aspergillus fumigatus. Experts detected the fungus in the lungs of nearly all the dead birds. They also found a likely source of the problem -- the next-door neighbor.

The business next to the falcon breeder is none other than Germany's largest plantation for organic delicacy mushrooms. The farm grows king oyster mushrooms, nameko and shiitake -- and mold grows there too. "That's what's killing our birds," says Hans Jürgen Küspert.

Is the mold too strong or are the falcons too weak? The two neighbors are currently engaged in a legal battle to resolve this question. The falcon breeders are suing for €3.5 million ($4.3 million) in damages. Their "exhibits" for court -- 600 dead falcons, frozen stiff at -18° Celsius (0° Fahrenheit) -- lie carefully preserved, numbered and sorted in plastic tubs in the large freezer that once held feed for the birds.

Public prosecutors are conducting investigations, but the case is complicated. Germany certainly has many laws -- some might even say too many laws -- but none of them governs the interactions of adjacent falcon breeding grounds and mushroom farms. Instead, the two parties are battling over possible illegal waste disposal and air pollution.

Falcons Are Big Business

Küspert believes that without the deadly mold, his business would still be running like a fairy tale from the Arabian Nights. "Arabs love birds the way we love dogs," he says, "and they pay well." A young falcon brings fetches an average of €5,000.

Even the crown prince of Dubai once made a trip to Helvesiek, in the mid-1990s. Back then the main issue was not Aspergillus fumigatus, but an unpleasantly fishy smell -- an eel farm used to occupy the space where mushrooms are now cultivated.

Then a building boom took place on both sides of the property line in the early part of the decade. The mushroom farm sprang up on one side, while on the other, the falcon breeders invested €6.5 million in an impressive showroom and guest rooms, where the sheiks could appraise the finest birds with a practiced eye from the comfort of a divan. But before construction was complete, the falcons started dying en masse.

Now experts with measuring equipment call here instead of Arab princes, to test how and where the mold disperses through the air. "The stronger the wind from the direction of the mushroom farm, the higher the detection frequency for A. fumigatus," notes animal hygienist Jörg Hartung.

Torsten Jonas, the manager of the mushroom farm, defends the presence of mold in his operation. "Our delicacy mushrooms grow in a moist wood substrate," he explains, "and of course that's susceptible to mold." It's also otherwise harmless, he adds. Perhaps, Jonas suggests, his neighbor's falcons already had weak lungs for other reasons entirely.

Still, Jonas initially offered the falcon breeders €200,000 in compensation, just to have peace and quiet again. Instead, he says, his neighbors insisted he should only grow mushrooms in hermetically sealed buildings. "That would cost so much that I might just as well shut down," Jonas says.

The authorities haven't shown any interest in the flying fungus. "There is no legal basis for banning the dispersal of mold spores -- there aren't even concentration limits," says Torsten Lühring, who heads the local council in the administrative district of Rotenburg. Lühring adds that any common compost pile is home to thriving mold.

Mold, in fact, is found everywhere on Earth and thrives especially in warm, humid climates, unlike the gyrfalcon and its hybrids -- the breed especially popular with Arab falconers -- which originate in the Arctic. As veterinarian Maria-Elisabeth Krautwald-Junghanns explained in an expert opinion for the court, the birds "often have health problems in southerly regions."

That settles the matter for Jonas, the mushroom cultivator. "The falcons simply don't belong here," he says. It is an argument Hans Jürgen Küspert refuses to accept. After all, he says, "we were here first."