The Far East taiga forest: unrecognized inhospitable terrain for migrating Arctic-nesting waterbirds?

Abstract

The degree of inhospitable terrain encountered by migrating birds can dramatically affect migration strategies and their evolution as well as influence the way we develop our contemporary flyway conservation responses to protect them. We used telemetry data from 44 tagged individuals of four large-bodied, Arctic breeding waterbird species (two geese, a swan and one crane species) to show for the first time that these birds fly non-stop over the Far East taiga forest, despite their differing ecologies and migration routes. This implies a lack of suitable taiga refuelling habitats for these long-distance migrants. These results underline the extreme importance of northeast China spring staging habitats and of Arctic areas prior to departure in autumn to enable birds to clear this inhospitable biome, confirming the need for adequate site safeguard to protect these populations throughout their annual cycle.

Does snowmelt constrain spring migration progression in sympatric wintering Arctic‐nesting geese? Results from a Far East Asia telemetry study

“…We differentiated migration bouts from stopovers along migration routes using the methods of Wang et al . (), which recognized the changes in movement pattern according to first passage time (FPT), a secondary signal of movement tracks (Edelhoff et al . ).…”

“…We differentiated migration bouts from stopovers along migration routes using the methods of Wang et al (2018), which recognized the changes in movement pattern according to first passage time (FPT), a secondary signal of movement tracks (Edelhoff et al 2016). FPT estimates the minimum duration of an animal crossing a given radius along its path (low when an organism is travelling, high when it resides within a restricted area).…”

“…Tracks generated from the fitted devices showed that, of the sample of marked birds, geese migrated along two separate flyways to discrete nesting areas (1) in the Anadyr Region (AR) in Far Eastern Russia and (2) throughout the Central Russian Arctic (CRA, see Results below). Both sets of birds departed simultaneously from the wintering grounds and initial staging areas in northeast China before traversing the taiga forest (Wang et al 2018). Hence, if migration duration were constrained by internal limitation, we would predict longer stopover durations for geese migrating longer distances (assuming similar stopover environment and equivalent food resources).…”

Variability among autumn migration patterns of Mongolian Common Shelducks (Tadorna tadorna)

“…The power of flight enables birds to exploit temporally constrained food resource abundance in habitats separated by long distances by undertaking seasonal migration episodes (e.g. Stutchbury et al 2009;Wang et al 2018). As a result, birds tend to use widely geographically separate breeding and survival habitats (sensu Alerstam and Högstedt 1982).…”

“…Long distance migratory waterbirds frequently concentrate at a narrow range of staging areas from very large breeding (e.g. Greater White-fronted Geese Anser albifrons, Wang et al 2018) and wintering provenances (e.g. Red Knot Calidris canutus, Atkinson et al 2005) at the continental scale.…”