ArticleScientific reports2016
Nocturnally migrating songbirds drift when they can and compensate when they must.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Weather Conditions Are Systematically Associated With Long-Range Nonroutine Movements in a Large Scavenger.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Origins of Nearctic migratory landbird vagrants recorded in Europe revealed by feather isotopic analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Radar-measured passerine vertical speeds reveal a migratory switch near a major barrier.iScience · 2025Article
- Offshore vagrancy in passerines is predicted by season, wind-drift, and species characteristics.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Contrasting seasonal responses to wind in migrating songbirds on a globally important flyway.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Space weather disrupts nocturnal bird migration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Soaring migrants flexibly respond to sea-breeze in a migratory bottleneck: using first derivatives to identify behavioural adjustments over time.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Article
- Favorable winds speed up bird migration in spring but not in autumn.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Optimization of dynamic soaring in a flap-gliding seabird affects its large-scale distribution at sea.Science advances · 2022Article
- Compensation for wind drift prevails for a shorebird on a long-distance, transoceanic flight.Movement ecology · 2022Article
- No apparent effect of a magnetic pulse on free-flight behaviour in northern wheatears (Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Spatial structure in migration routes maintained despite regional convergence among eastern populations of Swainson's Thrushes.Movement ecology · 2021Article
- Physical limits of flight performance in the heaviest soaring bird.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- A quasi-experimental approach using telemetry to assess migration-strategy-specific differences in the decision-making processes at stopover.BMC ecology · 2020Article
- Article
- Migratory flight on the Pacific Flyway: strategies and tendencies of wind drift compensation.Biology letters · 2019Article
- From Agricultural Benefits to Aviation Safety: Realizing the Potential of Continent-Wide Radar Networks.Bioscience · 2017Article
- Asymmetry hidden in birds' tracks reveals wind, heading, and orientation ability over the ocean.Science advances · 2017Article
- Wind conditions on migration influence the annual survival of a neotropical migrant, the western yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens auricollis).BMC ecology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The shortest possible migratory route for birds is not always the best route to travel. Substantial research effort has established that birds in captivity are capable of orienting toward the direction of an intended goal, but efforts to examine how free-living birds use navigational information under conditions that potentially make direct flight toward that goal inefficient have been limited in spatiotemporal scales and in the number of individuals observed because of logistical and technological limitations. Using novel and recently developed techniques for analysis of Doppler polarimetric weather surveillance radar data, we examined two impediments for nocturnally migrating songbirds in eastern North America following shortest-distance routes: crosswinds and oceans. We found that migrants in flight often drifted sideways on crosswinds, but most strongly compensated for drift when near the Atlantic coast. Coastal migrants' tendency to compensate for wind drift also increased through the night, while no strong temporal differences were observed at inland sites. Such behaviors suggest that birds migrate in an adaptive way to conserve energy by assessing while airborne the degree to which they must compensate for wind drift.
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