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
Attention has been drawn already to the nature of the nightly flights
at stations immediately inland from the Gulf coast, where densities
decline abruptly well before midnight. I have suggested that this
early drop-off is mainly a result of the small amount of terrain south
of these stations from which birds may be contributed to a night's
flight. At Oak Grove, Louisiana, the flight exhibited a strong
directional trend with no significant aberrant components. Therefore,
one may infer that a considerable part of the flight was derived from
regions to the south of the station.
At Mansfield, Louisiana, thirty-eight hours of observation in April
and May resulted in flight densities that are surprisingly low--much
lower, in fact, than at Oak Grove. In eleven of the hours of
observation no birds at all were seen. A possible explanation for
these low densities lies in the fact that eastern Texas and western
Louisiana, where, probably, the Mansfield flights originated, is not
an especially attractive region to migrants because of the great
amount of deforested and second growth pine land. Oak Grove, in
contrast, is in the great Tensas-Mississippi River flood plain,
characterized by an almost solid stand of deciduous forest extending
over thousands of square miles in the lower Mississippi valley.
[Illustration: FIG. 37. Sector density representation on
two nights at Rosedale, Mississippi, in 1948. The white lines
are the vector resultants.]
In further contrast to the considerable flight densities and
pronounced directional trend at Oak Grove, we have the results from
Rosedale, Mississippi, only seventy miles to the north and slightly to
the east. At Rosedale the densities were mediocre and the flight
directions were extremely divergent. Many of the nights of observation
at this locality were seriously interrupted by clouds, but such counts
as were made on those dates indicated little migration taking place.
On two nights, however, April 21-22 and May 20-21, visibility was
almost continuous and densities were moderately high. In Figure 37 I
have shown the flight directions for these two nights. The lengths of
the individual sector vectors are plotted as a percentage of the total
station density for each of the two nights (5,800 and 6,800 birds,
respectively). Although the vector resultants show a net movement of
birds to the northeast, there are important divergent components of
the flights. This "round-the-compass" pattern is characteristic of
stations on the edge of meteorological disturbances, as was Rosedale
on April 21-22, but not on the night of May 20-21. If bats are
presumed to have played a rôle in these latter observations, their
random flights would tend to cancel out and the vector resultant
would emerge as a graphic representation of the actual net trend
density of the birds and its prevailing direction of flow. Although I
do not believe that bats are the real reason for the diverse
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