Birds approach the challenges of migration in surprising ways. Learn how some birds migrate by walking, swimming or taking the scenic route.
5 Surprising Ways That Birds Migrate
Updated Sep. 19, 2024
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How Do Birds Migrate?
Autumn is migration season. All over North America and beyond, hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, traveling from their breeding grounds to their wintering grounds. But they don’t all travel in the same ways. Some birds migrate in flocks and some alone; certain birds move at night, others by day; some travel more than halfway around the globe, while certain birds shift only a few miles to a slightly different habitat. There are almost as many approaches as there are species of migratory birds. Here are just a few bird migration variations.
Learn all about hummingbird migration.
Wintering Within Walking Distance
Spruce grouse in northern forests have some of the easiest migrations imaginable. Individuals have summer and winter territories that are usually less than 10 miles apart, so they migrate by walking early in the morning—going perhaps half a mile per day—and then resting.
In mountains of the West, dusky grouse are also short-distance travelers. They migrate partly by walking and partly by flying, and they often move to areas of denser forest in higher elevations to spend the winter.
Discover bird migration patterns that have changed.
Swimming to New Waters
For a seabird that isn’t in a hurry, swimming is a reasonable way to migrate, and some members of the auk family do just that.
Common murres, for example, nest on islands off the coasts of Canada and Alaska and the Pacific Coast south to California, and the young birds leave their cliffside nests when they are still too young to fly. They tumble down to the water, which may be up to 1,500 feet below, before swimming away with their fathers—always the fathers, not the mothers, for reasons we still don’t know—sometimes traveling far from the breeding colony.
Thick-billed murres do the same thing, and so do ancient murrelets (though both the father and the mother ancient murrelets swim along with their youngsters).
Do robins migrate and fly south in winter?
Molt Migrators: Feeding Before Flying
When they leave their breeding territories, some birds don’t necessarily go toward their wintering grounds, and they may not even go south. Many ducks and geese will leave their nesting areas in midsummer and fly in various directions, even straight north, to get to particular lakes. They’re heading to these different locations to molt, shedding old feathers and growing new ones.
Most other kinds of birds molt their wing feathers gradually, a few at a time, so they never lose the ability to fly. Ducks and some other waterfowl, however, drop all the large flight feathers on their wings at once, so they are completely flightless until the new ones grow in. But before that happens, many will fly hundreds of miles to certain large, shallow lakes, where they can find plenty to eat in relative safety from predators during this vulnerable period.
But molt migrations aren’t only for flightless waterfowl. Many buntings, grosbeaks and other songbirds fly to southern Arizona in midsummer, after they finish nesting elsewhere and after the summer rains have turned Arizona’s lowlands green and lush again. There, they go through a normal molt in late summer before flying on to their wintering grounds in Mexico.
Check out these must-visit hawk migration hotspots.
Constant Fliers: Always Airborne
The black swift is an uncommon bird that nests on cliffs and behind waterfalls in western North America. Like other swifts, it’s a graceful flier and feeds by catching insects high in the air. When it starts flying south in fall, it just keeps on flying, sometimes for weeks or even months.
Studies conducted with tiny tracking devices placed on these birds showed that black swifts wintering over western South America may stay airborne more than 99% of the time, day and night, sleeping on the wing. The same constant aerial behavior has been found in other kinds of swifts, and in some seabirds as well, such as the great frigatebird.
Why do some birds migrate while others don’t?
Long-Distance Migration: Marathon Masters
Although swifts and frigatebirds may stay in the sky longer, there are other migrants that perform even more impressive feats of travel. Some Arctic terns spend the summer in the Arctic and the winter along the edge of the pack ice in Antarctica, flying more than 50,000 miles round trip each year.
The bar-tailed godwit, a type of large sandpiper, regularly flies nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand in fall, a continuous flight of more than 7,000 miles. One individual tracked by satellite bypassed New Zealand and continued to the island of Tasmania, south of Australia.
By the time it finally landed, it had been flying without pause for 11 days and had covered more than 8,000 miles! Such extreme endurance requires a lot of fuel: Bar-tailed godwits fatten up before leaving Alaska, doubling their weight so they can burn fat as they fly.
They even absorb some of their own internal organs, then regrow them after they reach the wintering grounds. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s a very real part of the amazing world of migratory birds.
Where do migratory birds spend the winter?
How Do Young Birds Learn to Migrate?
When young birds make their first southward migration in fall, how do they find their way? Some simply follow their parents as an example—this is true for swans, geese and cranes, all of which navigate by visual landmarks.
But the vast majority of young migrants travel on their own, navigating by the sun, the stars and the earth’s magnetic field, finding the wintering grounds purely by instinct.
Next, learn more about Baltimore oriole migration.
Originally Published: September 19, 2024
