This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: At the southwest tip of Sweden, the Falsterbo Peninsula stretches into the Baltic Sea, creating a natural bottleneck for hundreds of millions of birds traveling south for the winter each year. Falsterbo is particularly known for raptor migration.
One autumn morning, I stood with a group of others by the lighthouse, watching birds gather to cross the open sea—a sight to take your breath away. For thousands of years, the astounding adventure of bird migration defied human understanding, until a breakthrough came in the form of a white stork in 1822. The bird arrived in Germany after being shot with an arrow by a hunter in Africa.
He had survived a 5,000-kilometer (3,100-mile) migration to the Baltic Sea coast with the arrow still embedded in his body. Made of tropical African wood, the arrow provided the first physical proof of long-distance bird migration between Europe and Africa. Subsequently, bird-banding programs developed in the 20th century have shed light on some of the incredible journeys made by migratory birds, such as the 1912 recovery in South Africa of a swallow banded in Great Britain.
Large numbers of Eurasian kestrels are known to travel from their breeding grounds in northern Europe to wintering destinations as far as Angola and Zimbabwe. In Africa, however, studies of wintering raptors from northern latitudes remain rare. More than 2 billion land birds that nest in Eurasia migrate annually to and from Africa during the nonbreeding season.
Every autumn, more than 400,000 raptors travel along the 5,000 km (3,100-mile) flyway between Scandinavia and coastal West Africa, but their precise movements and destinations in Africa remain poorly known. Using 257 records of raptors banded in 16 Western European countries, we investigated the migratory connectivity of the osprey, black kite, western marsh harrier, European honey buzzard and Eurasian kestrel in the West African countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin. Our findings were published in Environmental and Experimental Biology.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of banded raptors in our West African study area originated in Finland (37%) and Sweden (27%). Ospreys made up more than half (56%) of all banded raptors in the area, and the vast majority (95%) of ospreys originated in Finland (56%) and Sweden (39%). Black kites made up 21% of banded raptors in our study area: 36% originated in Switzerland, 30% in Spain and 25% in Germany, with the remainder from France and Portugal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
