Satellite‐tracking of 15 White‐naped Cranes (Grus vipio) from their Japanese wintering grounds through the Korean Peninsula shows that there are four important regions for conserving migrant cranes: the Three Rivers Plain, the People’s Republic of China; Lake Khanka, Russia; Kumya, North Korea; and—most importantly—the demilitarized zone of the Korean Peninsula. Two sites along the Korean demilitarized zone, Panmunch’om and Ch’olwon, were the most heavily used stopover sites, and they present complex international conservation challenges. Cranes stopped at these sites for up to 87.1% of their total migration time; cranes migrating to Zhalong Nature Reserve, China, made it their only lengthy stop. We report the migration routes and the importance of the identified stopover sites, and we outline conservation issues at those sites.

Autumn migration routes of red‐crowned cranes, Grus japonensis, from two continental east Asian sites were documented in detail by satellite tracking. Two routes were identified: a 2200 km western route from Russia's Khingansky Nature Reserve to coastal Jiangsu Province, China; and a 900 km eastern route from Lake Khanka (Russia) to the Korean Peninsula and the Demilitarized Zone. The most important rest‐sites were identified as Panjin Marsh (China), coastal mudflats south‐east of Tangshan City (China), the Yellow River mouth (China), Tumen River mouth (North Korea/China/Russia), Kumya (North Korea) and Cholwon (Korean DMZ). Movements within the wintering range were also recorded, including complex commuting between sites by individual cranes and patterns of daily movements within sites. These data should prove useful for conservation of the flyway.

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Since 1958, Apalopteron familiare has been placed in the Meliphagidae and called the Bonin Islands Honeyeater or Ogasawara Honeyeater. Previously it had been treated as a bulbul, a babbler, a sylviid warbler and a white-eye. Here we present 12S rRNA sequence evidence that shows that Apalopteron is a member of the white-eye family Zosteropidae, closely-related to the Golden White-eye (Cleptornis marchei) of the southern Mariana Islands, which was also misidentified as a honeyeater until its true affinities were revealed by field observations and DNA-DNA hybridization. The ecology and behavior of Apalopteron and Zosterops are compared and reviewed. The English name Bonin Islands White-eye is proposed for Apalopteron familiars.

The present study describes a procedure for quantitatively analyzing satellite telemetry data to identify interspecific land use differences among four threatened crane species. The inherent inaccuracy of satellite telemetry data points, the temporal autocorrelation of those points, and the resolution of two land-cover imagery products from the IGBP-DISCover Global Land-Cover Characterization Project (derived from AVHRR data) were assessed and integrated in a GIS. Satellite telemetry is a system where animals are tracked using battery-operated transmitters and locations are calculated using triangulation from satellites. Using the variable spatial inaccuracy of the telemetry locations, each point was buffered using a radius based on the accuracy of the point, and then intersected with the land cover imagery. The research concluded that the methodology is valuable for studies of birds at a regional scale, with interspecific differences clearly evident, but that diurnal and nocturnal differences were not discernable due to the coarse resolution of both satellite telemetry and land-cover data.