11/08/2019
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 assembled an unprecedented effort to track where Prothonotary Warblers that breed across six states in the eastern US go in winter, and found that nearly the entire species depends on a relatively small area in Colombia threatened by deforestation and sociopolitical changes.
Ohio State University's Christopher Tonra and his colleagues co-ordinated 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 had suggested they relied on most heavily.
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