Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Curk, Teja
• Pokrovsky, Ivan
• Lecomte, Nicolas
• Aarvak, Tomas
• Brinker, David F
• Burnham, Kurt
• Dietz, Andreas
• Dixon, Andrew
• Franke, Alastair
• Gauthier, Gilles
• Jacobsen, Karl-Otto
• Kidd, Jeff
• Lewis, Stephen B
• Øien, Ingar J
• Sokolov, Aleksandr
• Sokolov, Vasiliy
• Solheim, Roar
• Weidensaul, Scott
• Wiebe, Karen
• Wikelski, Martin
• Therrien, Jean-François
• Safi, Kamran

Titel

Arctic avian predators synchronise their spring migration with the northern progression of snowmelt

Ist Teil von

• Scientific reports, 2020-04, Vol.10 (1), p.7220-7220, Article 7220

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Migratory species display a range of migration patterns between irruptive (facultative) to regular (obligate), as a response to different predictability of resources. In the Arctic, snow directly influences resource availability. The causes and consequences of different migration patterns of migratory species as a response to the snow conditions remains however unexplored. Birds migrating to the Arctic are expected to follow the spring snowmelt to optimise their arrival time and select for snow-free areas to maximise prey encounter en-route. Based on large-scale movement data, we compared the migration patterns of three top predator species of the tundra in relation to the spatio-temporal dynamics of snow cover. The snowy owl, an irruptive migrant, the rough-legged buzzard, with an intermediary migration pattern, and the peregrine falcon as a regular migrant, all followed, as expected, the spring snowmelt during their migrations. However, the owl stayed ahead, the buzzard stayed on, and the falcon stayed behind the spatio-temporal peak in snowmelt. Although none of the species avoided snow-covered areas, they presumably used snow presence as a cue to time their arrival at their breeding grounds. We show the importance of environmental cues for species with different migration patterns.