What are the nomadic and circular routes of the ave: Migraciondeaves.org offers a new vision of migration routes collected thanks to the Migra program from SEO/BirdLife, including new types of movements.
Birds perform pre-Saharan and trans-Saharan migrations during their annual cycle, but they are not the only ones. Two spectacular types of movements are incorporated. They are the so-called nomadic and circular movements..
Migraciondeaves.org It also has access to global scientific and ornithological reference centers for migratory birds such as Movebank, Bird Migration Audubon, BirdCast, EuroBird Portal, the III Atlas of birds from the ONG of the Eurasian African Bird Migration Atlas.
What distinguishes the group of birds from other taxonomic groups is the extent and visibility of their seasonal movements throughout their lives, unlike other groups of fauna whose movements are typically less observable. These movements cause the distribution of their populations to vary between seasons and over the years, so obtaining information that documents these changes is critical to their conservation.
He Migra program of the NGO, in collaboration with the Iberdrola Spain Foundation, was launched in 2011 with the aim of collecting information on the movements of birds. To date, this program has focused its efforts on remote tagging and monitoring of species, allowing this website to display these movements in detail, species by species, through interactive maps and videos. These resources will allow you to spend hours analyzing different aspects of each species’ journey.
In Migraciondeaves.org Information is also offered on general concepts of migration, the methods used in the Migra program, and interactive cartography that facilitates the visualization of the movements of the birds studied. In addition, access is provided to publications on the species analyzed during the years of development of the Migra program.
Birds in nomadic and circular movements
Movement is fundamental to the interaction between organisms and their habitats, both in space and time. Therefore, changes in movement patterns can have significant consequences at the ecosystem level. In birds, two major groups are usually distinguished based on their post-reproductive movements: sedentary/resident and migratory species.
Those that stay in the same area year-round are considered ‘sedentary’, and those that make seasonal movements are considered ‘migratory’. However, these categories do not include all the diversity of movement behaviors that birds exhibit: routine daily movements, dispersal, dispersed migration, migration, disturbances and nomadism.
Thanks to technological progress, we know more and more accurately not only the movements near breeding grounds of sedentary species, but also large intercontinental movements. These surveys provide detailed data on flight speed at each stage of the migration, altitudes reached, resting sites, time spent at each location and habitats used at each time, among many other aspects.
What are nomadic and circular movements?
The two new types of movements presented on this website show that birds do not only carry out the traditional migrations that we usually observe, such as large flocks of cranes or geese traveling from north to south in spring and autumn.
The movementsmarine/circular” now available on this site illustrate the impressive ability of seabirds to travel tens of thousands of kilometers, cross oceans and move along the coasts of several continents and hemispheres. On the other hand, the ‘nomadic’ movements The elements recorded show little-known transverse routes within the European continent, other than the north-south migrations we are used to.
The movements of little-known birds such as shearwaters and storm petrels, included in this new option, reflect these species’ extraordinary sense of direction. They can travel from Europe to North America, descend to South America, cross to Africa and return to their breeding ground in the Canary Islands.
Similarly, the movements of flamingos, gray teals and short-eared owls are notable for their nomadic nature, visiting numerous areas within the continent in seemingly random trajectories in search of optimal food sources at different times of the year. This flexibility allows them to reproduce where conditions are most favorable. At a practical level, the detailed identification of the different types of movements of these species is possible thanks to the marking and monitoring plans implemented by the Migra program for more than twelve years.
SEO/BirdLife Migra Program
He Migra programLaunched in 2011 by the NGO in collaboration with the Iberdrola Spain Foundation, it incorporates the latest technologies in geolocation and remote monitoring systems to understand in more detail the movements of birds inside and outside our country.
Thanks to this initiative it is possible to know the start and end dates of their migrations, the stopping points and feeding points, the time required to make these journeys, whether they are repeated during the spring and autumn migration, the main wintering areas and distribution , or if the routes are the same year after year. The Iberdrola Spain Foundation collaborates with this program as part of its activities in support of biodiversity, one of its main areas of action.