Scientists are on the brink of
learning the details of where they go and why.
By Dyani Sabin Yesterday
at 1:00pm
At the end of April, or when
spring starts to thaw, a great migration north begins. Thousands upon thousands
of songbirds make the trek, but you won’t see most of them. They fly in the
dark to avoid as many predators as possible, and in doing so evade the humans
trying to study them as well.
So, even as 4,000 of the world’s 10,000 bird species fly
over our heads every night, scientists are still scrambling to answer basic
questions. When do birds decide to migrate? How dangerous is it? And how do
anthropogenic factors like light pollution and climate change impact birds as
they travel?
For much of the history of
migration studies, ornithologists would have to go out to field stations,
catching and tagging birds as they stopped. Research data on a single
population took several years of trying to recapture tagged birds. As citizen
science bloomed, ornithologists enlisted volunteers to help count their study
subjects, then radar allowed researchers to track birds in the air, but even
still, the studies were arduous.
“We are learning about things now
on much larger scales. Even ten years ago, if you wanted to study something you
had to go out and gather the data yourself,” says Morgan Tingley, an
ornithologist at the University of Connecticut. “I think in twenty years,
ornithologists probably will have a good sense at any point in time where the
majority of species are living and what they’re doing.”
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