Capercaillie. One species, one world.
A fictional mini-platform around a real Swiss species, as a use case for storytelling. What a scientifically sound story can look like when it becomes a reading journey.
Capercaillie. One species, one world.
A fictional mini-platform around a real Swiss species, as a use case for storytelling. What a scientifically sound story can look like when it becomes a reading journey.
A story that builds closeness while staying scientifically honest.
What this service is
Storytelling as a service: turning a species, a phenomenon, a person into a world someone can enter. A reading journey with breathing room, with data, with sources.
The subpage shows the anatomy of such a world, using the Swiss capercaillie as an example. The story is real, the need is too. The platform is a sketch of how a Swiss conservation organisation could make this story tangible for a broad audience.
Acts
Six narrative chapters as anatomy
Breath
Audio, image and pulse between the acts
Data
Scientific visualisations, embedded inline
Sources
Every claim linked and citable
Where it fits, where it does not
- an endangered species, an ongoing research project, a historical figure
- organisations with finished research but no fitting format
- subjects with an emotional core and a solid data backbone
- communication to audiences beyond the specialist circle
- classic image brochures or PR websites
- topics without scientific or documentary basis
- platforms that need constant editorial upkeep by a team
- mass-market campaigns with reach as the primary goal
The starting point
A Swiss conservation organisation wants to bring the capercaillie story to a broad audience. The brochure, the annual report, the press release are proven tools and reach the usual circle.
What if the story existed instead as an atmospheric reading journey. With display-call audio, live distribution data, a visual comparison of the historical shrinkage. With open sources and a depth that carries the science.
What follows is that world as a sketch.
Six acts, one species
This is how the capercaillie platform could be built. Each act one step deeper into the story, each act with real data and sources.
Encounter
A voice older than most forests. The capercaillie's display song alternates between dry clicks, a metallic scraping and a short final beat. In April and May the cocks gather before dawn at traditional lek sites, a tradition passed down in the same forests for millennia.
Lek display
Pavel Pelz · Kvilda, Czech Republic
Habitat
Today roughly half of all Swiss capercaillie cocks live in Graubünden. The focal areas in the Engadine sit on the valley slopes between Susch, Zernez and Brail, and around S-chanf. The species has vanished from large parts of the country: the central Jura, the western Alpine northern slope, the inner-alpine valleys of central Switzerland.
Schematic depiction of the focal areas after the breeding bird atlas and the Graubünden capercaillie concept. Precise coordinates are deliberately omitted, the species is sensitive to disturbance.
Numbers
Over 50 years Switzerland lost more than half of its capercaillie cocks. In 1971 around 900–1000 cocks were counted. In 2001 it was 450–500. As of 2025 the estimate stands at 380–480 cocks.
What these numbers do not show: that the same species once stood in almost every Swiss mountain forest, from Geneva to the Engadine. Today it crowds into a few focal areas, the occurrences lie like islands in a landscape it can hardly move through anymore.
Population numbers after the breeding bird atlas / Swiss Ornithological Institute.
The four causes
The federal action plan names four main causes for the decline. They act together, not separately. Each on its own would be manageable, all at once they tip the balance.
Changed forest
Anyone walking through a Swiss mountain forest today rarely finds what a hen needs to raise her chicks.
Forests grow over, become darker and more uniform. Capercaillie needs open, structure-rich coniferous forest with old trees and a ground layer of vegetation, not the dense commercial forest that is the standard today.
Fragmented habitat
A road, a railway, a ski resort, and a forest becomes an island.
Roads, ski resorts, settlements cut the once-connected mountain forests into islands. Genetic exchange becomes difficult, small subpopulations lose their stability.
Human disturbance
In winter every calorie counts. Whoever startles the cock costs him reserves he no longer has.
Ski tours, snowshoers, mountain-bike trails in the winter habitat burn the birds' reserves at the worst time. Repeated disturbance in spring can cost a brood.
Climate and predators
A winter too warm, a spring too wet, one more wild boar in the forest.
Milder, less snowy winters change the food supply, wetter springs raise chick mortality. At the same time wild boar and fox densities have risen.
A surprising finding
A long-term study from eight Jura forest patches, analysed between 2009 and 2015, showed an overall population decline of two percent per year. But the sex-separated analysis revealed: only the male numbers shrank. The female population stayed stable in the same period.
Such a finding is not intuitive. It points to sex-specific mortality, possible causes range from predator selection to spatially different habitat use. It is exactly this kind of finding that needs space, it contradicts the simple narrative.
Mollet et al., bioRxiv 2019.
The same species once stood in almost every Swiss mountain forest, from Geneva to the Engadine.
Distribution history · Swiss Ornithological Institute
What is happening
The Swiss capercaillie action plan has been in force since 2008. The federal office and the cantons coordinate forestry measures, protected areas, wildlife rest zones. The Swiss Ornithological Institute and BirdLife Switzerland carry research and outreach. Graubünden has its own capercaillie concept that differentiates the focal areas regionally.
What I would contribute here: a reading journey that carries this research without simplifying it. The platform is not an appeal. It is a space where someone can spend twenty minutes and at the end understand more than before. Not only about the capercaillie. Also about what remains to be done.
How I would build it
Four phases, in this order, with clear handovers.
Understand
Conversations with the host organisation, the scientists, conservation practitioners. What is the story still missing? Which data exists, which sources are robust?
Concept
First sketch of the world: number of acts, tone, depth. Which data becomes visualisation, which prose. Which media: audio, image, interactive map. Concept review with the organisation, then sign-off.
Build
Editorial text, visualisations, audio integration, live data connection where it makes sense. Performance budget from the start: the page must be readable on an old smartphone in thirty seconds.
Polish
Scientific peer-read, editorial final pass, source check. Handover to the organisation with maintenance documentation.
Scientific foundation
All data and statements on this page are based on the following sources.
- Swiss Ornithological Institute — Capercaillie species support
- BAFU — Capercaillie Action Plan Switzerland (PDF)
- waldwissen.net — Capercaillie Action Plan Switzerland
- Bird Species Support Switzerland — Capercaillie factsheet (PDF)
- Capercaillie Concept Graubünden (PDF)
- Mollet, Saniga & Bollmann — Sex-specific population dynamics (bioRxiv 2019)
- Mollet et al. — Genetic analyses of non-invasive samples (Conservation Genetics)
- BirdLife Switzerland — Capercaillie Action Plan
- SRF News — Where the capercaillie still lives
- ornitho.ch — Swiss Ornithological Institute
- xeno-canto — Tetrao urogallus audio archive (CC)
Earth history as scrollytelling
A scrollytelling journey through the layers of Earth's history. Same narrative pattern as a story subpage: acts, breath, data.
A world to tell?
If you are working on a story that deserves more breathing room than a brochure, get in touch. First conversation, no strings attached.