Fifty years ago, the Kirtland’s
warbler seemed to be on its last legs. Fewer than 400 of these Michigan
songbirds, which weigh less than an empty soda can and are only slightly
taller, were left, so the species, Setophaga kirtlandii, became one of the first
beneficiaries of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Today, its population has
increased 10-fold, making it a poster child for conservationists and bird
lovers alike. That improvement came from planting more jack pines, which the
bird needs to nest in, in its summer home in upper Michigan. Even so, only
about 40% of the birds survive the annual migration to the Bahamas and back. To
learn more about this journey, researchers outfitted 50 warblers with tiny
geolocators (weighing just 0.5 grams—at the time, the smallest ever developed
for an animal), which recorded the light intensity every 2 minutes, data
indicative of sunrise and sunset that can be used to calculate latitude and
longitude. In the fall, the warblers first
headed east over Ontario to the coast, then turned southward to the Bahamas, the
team reports this week in the Journal of Avian Biology. The warblers took a
different route in the spring, flying straight west and stopping off in Florida
for a week or so before turning north toward Michigan. Each way, they travel
about 4500 kilometers in about 16 days. This was the first time anyone has
tracked this species over an entire year, and though not much was learned about
what it does en route, the locations of stopovers is a starting point for
improving its protection, the researchers say.
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