Passerine Migration: Stopovers and Flights

As migrants, swallows, swifts and cuckoos have a cultural resonance far beyond that of most bird species. Although some birds make astonishingly long non-stop journeys: the arctic tern which migrates from Arctic to Antarctic every year, or the Alaskan breeding populations of bar-tailed godwit which migrates non-stop over the Pacific to its wintering grounds in New Zealand, for example. Most birds, though, require to stopover part-way through their migratory journey, primarily to take on extra fuel. Because such stopovers are generally rather brief, typically a matter of days, they can be hard to study, despite their critical importance in the life-cycle of our migratory species.

This slim volume summarises much of the work looking at migratory stopovers. There can few people better qualified to do this than Nikita Chernetsov, who has worked on the Courish Spit on the south coast of the Baltic, a major migration hotspot, for the last twenty years. The book covers, briefly, a number of topics, including the duration of stop-overs, habitat selection, fuel deposition rates and the energetics of migration, and blends a comprehensive survey o the literature with results garnered from the impressive amount of fieldwork undertaken, mostly on nocturnal passerine migrants, at the Rybachy field station. This represents a bit of a short-coming, in that, by overlooking non-passerines, a wide diversity of research is largely ignored.

The book is aimed at academics, and the high price will restrict it to the largest libraries but, for those seriously interested in migration ecology, this book represents a useful synthesis of an important aspect of the ecology of some of our most iconic species.

Book reviewed by Rob Robinson