Research Reveals the Secret Sites Where America's Migrating Songbirds Stop to Rest and Refuel

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-reveals-secret-sites-america-migrating.html

Every year, billions of birds migrate thousands of miles from their summer breeding ranges to their warmer wintering ranges and back. However, the question of where these birds stop to rest and refuel along the way has long stumped ornithologists.

Princeton Ph.D. student Fengyi Guo and her colleagues from Princeton and the University of Delaware address this question in a newly published paper by using weather radar imagery to map the birds' migratory stopover sites in North America.

Using weather surveillance radar to compute and compare bird movement patterns across five years of spring and fall migrations, Guo and her team pinpointed over 2.4 million hectares of land as key stopover hotspots for land birds across the eastern United States.

[...] The radar imagery showed that stopover hotspots along the eastern U.S. consist primarily of deciduous forests, including forest fragments in broadly deforested regions. These hotspots serve as crucial pitstops for large numbers of land birds each year. Protecting these sites helps to ensure the long-term viability of all the bird species that sojourn at these sites.

However, only half of the currently protected hotspots are free from any form of extractive resource use, and two-thirds of all identified hotspots lack any formal protection at all. Guo also found substantial seasonal differences in where hotspots were located.

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