Trans-equatorial migration routes, staging sites and wintering areas of a High-Arctic avian predator: the Long-tailed Skua (Stercorarius longicaudus).
The Long-tailed Skua, a small (,300 g) Arctic-breeding predator and seabird, is a functionally very important component of the Arctic vertebrate communities in summer, but little is known about its migration and winter distribution. We used lightlevel geolocators to track the annual movements of eight adult birds breeding in north-east Greenland (n = 3) and Svalbard (n = 5). All birds wintered in the Southern Hemisphere (mean arrival-departure dates on wintering grounds: 24 October-21 March): five along the south-west coast of Africa (0–40uS, 0–15uE), in the productive Benguela upwelling, and three further south (30–40uS, 0–50uE), in an area extending into the south-west Indian Ocean. Diffe…
Multispecies tracking reveals a major seabird hotspot in the North Atlantic
The conservation of migratory marine species, including pelagic seabirds, is challenging because their movements span vast distances frequently beyond national jurisdictions. Here, we aim to identify important aggregations of seabirds in the North Atlantic to inform ongoing regional conservation efforts. Using tracking, phenology, and population data, we mapped the abundance and diversity of 21 seabird species. This revealed a major hotspot associated with a discrete area of the subpolar frontal zone, used annually by 2.9–5 million seabirds from ≥56 colonies in the Atlantic: the first time this magnitude of seabird concentrations has been documented in the high seas. The hotspot is temporal…
Seabird migration strategies: Flight budgets, diel activity patterns and lunar influence
Every year, billions of birds undertake extensive migrations between breeding and nonbreeding areas, facing challenges that require behavioural adjustments, particularly to flight timing and duration. Such adjustments in daily activity patterns and the influence of extrinsic factors (e.g., environmental conditions, moonlight) have received much more research attention in terrestrial than marine migrants. Taking advantage of the widespread deployment in recent decades of combined light-level geolocator-immersion loggers, we investigated diel organisation and influence of the moon on flight activities during the non-breeding season of 21 migrant seabird species from a wide taxonomic range (6 …
Flexibility in otherwise consistent non-breeding movements of a long-distance migratory seabird, the long-tailed skua
Quantifying within- and between-individual variation in animal migration strategies is a first step towards our understanding of the ability of migrants to adjust to changes in the en - vironment. We studied consistency (or, conversely, flexibility) in movement patterns at large (>1000 km) to meso-scales (100−1000 km) during the non-breeding season of the long-tailed skua Stercorarius longicaudus, a long-distance migratory Arctic seabird, using light-based geolocation. We obtained 97 annual tracks of 38 individuals and quantified similarity between routes. Overall, tracks of the same individual were generally within about 200 to 300 km of their previous year’s route, and more similar than t…
A Migratory Divide Among Red-Necked Phalaropes in the Western Palearctic Reveals Contrasting Migration and Wintering Movement Strategies
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