Track seasonal bird migration with National Audubon Society's tool

Chris Pietsch, Eugene Register-Guard
·2 min read

The seasonal migration of birds across the globe is a remarkable wonder of our natural world.

The National Audubon Society's Bird Migration Explorer provides an opportunity to track some of these movements.

The Bird Migration Explorer, launched on September 2022, is an online tool that allows visitors to track the journeys of more than 450 migratory birds that regularly occur in the United States and Canada as they make their way across the Western Hemisphere.

“Migratory birds connect us to faraway places of the world,” Melanie Smith, the Audobon Society's director of digital science and data products, said during a recent online demonstration of the tool with journalists.

“What you can see is these long journeys — that birds are connecting all of these places across the hemisphere,” Smith added.

The Bird Migration Explorer website.
The Bird Migration Explorer website.

Smith highlighted a species that spends time near her Alaska home in spring and summer. The lesser yellowlegs that frequent the estuaries near Anchorage may have come from wintering grounds in Peru.

“So what I'm seeing — the bird off the side of this popular trail in Anchorage, it really is such a special event that, that bird is even there,” she said.

For The National Audubon Society, the project was created with a sense of urgency.

“We've lost 3 billion birds from North America in the last 50 years, of which 2.5 billion are migratory birds, “ Smith said.

“Birds matter because they tell us about the health of our environment and when we protect the places that they need we also protect the places people and other wildlife need,” she added.

An American White Pelican lets out a yawn as the bird settles in for the night with a flock gathered on Kirk Pond northwest of Eugene at sunset. One of the largest North American birds, the American White Pelican migrates through the western United States, Mexico and Central America, but breed at fewer than 60 colonies in the U.S.
An American White Pelican lets out a yawn as the bird settles in for the night with a flock gathered on Kirk Pond northwest of Eugene at sunset. One of the largest North American birds, the American White Pelican migrates through the western United States, Mexico and Central America, but breed at fewer than 60 colonies in the U.S.

The visualization was created using data collected by hundreds of researchers and organizations from a variety of tracking methods. The database is updated as information becomes available. More than half of all bird species have not been tracked and data may come from only a few individuals representing their species.

Plotted on a map of the Western Hemisphere, the color-coded journeys represented by flight paths form a flowing rainbow of overlapping lines from north to south over the land and sea.

Clickable menus allow sorting by species, location and even individual birds.

Contact photographer Chris Pietsch at chris.pietsch@registerguard.com, or follow him on Twitter @ChrisPietsch and Instagram @chrispietsch.

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Track migratory birds with National Audubon Society tool