A Quantitative Study of the Nocturnal Migration of BirdsLowery, George H., Jr.
Science
A Quantitative Study of the Nocturnal Migration of Birds
Lowery, George H., Jr.
Birds -- Migration
The situation at Tampico has been dealt with at length because, among
all the locations for which data are available, it is the one that
most strongly supports the topographical hypothesis. In none of the
other cases have I been able to find a definite relation between the
direction of migration and the features of the terrain. Studies of
data from some of these stations disclose directional patterns that
vary from night to night only slightly more than does the flight at
Tampico. In three nights of observation at Lawrence, Kansas, marked by
very high densities, the directional trend was north by
north-northeast with a variation of less than 8°, yet Lawrence is so
situated that there seems to be no feature of the landscape locally or
in the whole of eastern Kansas or of western Missouri that coincides
with this heading. At Mansfield, Louisiana, in twelve nights of
observation, the strong east by northeast trend varied less than 15°,
but again there appears to be no correlation over a wide area between
this direction and any landmarks. And, at Progreso, Yucatán, where the
vector resultants were 21° and 27° on successive nights, most of the
birds seen had left the land and were beginning their flight northward
over the trackless waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, as I
have elsewhere pointed out (1946: 205), the whole northern part of the
Yucatán Peninsula itself is a flat terrain, unmarked by rivers,
mountains, or any other strong physiographic features that conceivably
might be followed by birds.
[Illustration: FIG. 33. The nightly net trend of migrations
at three stations in 1948. Each arrow is the vector resultant
for a particular night, its length expressing the nightly
density as a percentage of the total station density for the
nights represented. Thus, the various station diagrams are
not to the same scale.]
In Figure 33 I have shown the directional patterns at certain stations
where, unlike the cases noted above, there is considerable change on
successive nights. Each vector shown is the vector resultant for one
particular night. The lengths of the vectors have been determined by
their respective percentages of the total computed density, or total
station magnitude, for all the nights in question. In other words, the
lengths of the individual vectors denote the percentile rôle that each
night played in the total density. From the directional spread at
these stations it becomes apparent that if most of the birds were
traveling along a certain topographic feature on one night, they
could not have been traveling along the same feature on other nights.
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