Inclement weather forces stopovers and prevents migratory progress for obligate soaring migrants

Migrating birds experience weather conditions that change with time, which affect their decision to stop or resume migration. Soaring migrants are especially sensitive to changing weather conditions because they rely on the availability of environmental updrafts to subsidize flight. The timescale th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Movement ecology 2021-07, Vol.9 (1), p.39-9, Article 39
Main Authors: Mallon, Julie M, Bildstein, Keith L, Fagan, William F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Artificial satellites
Avoidance
Behavior
Bird migration
Birds
Cathartes
Cathartes aura
Cathartidae
Datasets
Energy minimization
Flight behavior
Fly-and-forage
Global positioning systems
GPS
Meteorological data
Populations
Precipitation
Precipitation (Meteorology)
Raptors
Satellite navigation systems
Satellite tracking
Soaring
Velocity
Vultures
Weather
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Summary:Migrating birds experience weather conditions that change with time, which affect their decision to stop or resume migration. Soaring migrants are especially sensitive to changing weather conditions because they rely on the availability of environmental updrafts to subsidize flight. The timescale that local weather conditions change over is on the order of hours, while stopovers are studied at the daily scale, creating a temporal mismatch. We used GPS satellite tracking data from four migratory Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) populations, paired with local weather data, to determine if the decision to stopover by migrating Turkey Vultures was in response to changing local weather conditions. We analyzed 174 migrations of 34 individuals from 2006 to 2019 and identified 589 stopovers based on variance of first passage times. We also investigated if the extent of movement activity correlated with average weather conditions experienced during a stopover, and report general patterns of stopover use by Turkey Vultures between seasons and across populations. Stopover duration ranged from 2 h to more than 11 days, with 51 % of stopovers lasting 
ISSN:2051-3933
2051-3933
DOI:10.1186/s40462-021-00274-6