Inclement weather forces stopovers and prevents migratory progress for obligate soaring migrants.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Migrating birds experience weather conditions that change with time, which affect their decision to stop or resume migration. Soaring migrants are especially sensitive to changing weather conditions because they rely on the availability of environmental updrafts to subsidize flight. The timescale that local weather conditions change over is on the order of hours, while stopovers are studied at the daily scale, creating a temporal mismatch.

Methods

We used GPS satellite tracking data from four migratory Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) populations, paired with local weather data, to determine if the decision to stopover by migrating Turkey Vultures was in response to changing local weather conditions. We analyzed 174 migrations of 34 individuals from 2006 to 2019 an

SUBMITTER: Mallon JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8272267 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature