Date: June 19, 2019
Source: American Ornithological Society Publications
Office
Many of
North America's migratory songbirds, which undertake awe-inspiring journeys
twice a year, are declining at alarming rates. For conservation efforts to succeed,
wildlife managers need to know where they go and what challenges they face
during their annual migration to Latin America and back. For a new study
published by The Condor: Ornithological Applications, researchers in six
states assembled an unprecedented effort to track where Prothonotary Warblers
that breed across the eastern U.S. go in winter -- their "migratory
connectivity" -- and found that nearly the entire species depends on a
relatively small area in Colombia threatened by deforestation and sociopolitical
changes.
The Ohio
State University's Christopher Tonra and his colleagues coordinated the
deployment of 149 geolocators, tiny devices that use the timing of dawn and
dusk to estimate birds' locations, on Prothonotary Warblers captured at sites
across their breeding range. When the birds returned to their nesting sites the
following year, the researchers were able to recover 34 devices that contained
enough data for them to use. The geolocator data showed that regardless of
where they bred, most of the warblers used the same two major Central American
stopover sites during their migration and spent the winter in a relatively
small area of northern Colombia. Additionally, many Prothonotary Warblers
appeared to winter in inland areas, rather than in coastal mangrove habitat,
which previous studies suggested they relied on most heavily.
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