About the project

More than 50 species of migratory landbirds, whose combined populations represent nearly one billion individuals, migrate through the Neotropics to North America every year. Many of these species are in precipitous decline, with those that migrate farthest disappearing the quickest. Of all the periods of the life cycle, migration is the least understood and yet, it is when the majority of mortality occurs. It follows that the degradation of major stopover sites, where birds attain the energy to fuel migration, can lead to significant declines, threatening the viability of populations across the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately, we are still in the dark as to where the majority of birds stop en route between North America and the Neotropics, and what they eat to fuel long-distance flights. To fill critical gaps in our knowledge of bird’s needs during migration, the Neotropical Flyways Project was born in 2016 with the goal of identifying migration routes and key stopover sites – where the energy for migration is obtained – across six countries in Central and South America.

To successfully migrate between their breeding and wintering grounds, Nearctic-Neotropical migrants typically depend on a series of (stopover) sites along the length of their migratory route, which provide critical resources such as the fuel for migratory flights, safe roosting sites, and refuges where birds can make emergency stops. Outside of North America, the funnel-shaped geography of Central America and the biogeography of northern Colombia, act as bottlenecks, concentrating millions of migratory landbirds into a tiny area (relative to their breeding grounds), magnifying the importance of Neotropical stopover sites. Birds migrating through this region may also face major barriers such as the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, necessitating the existence of vital stopover regions where the fuel for a safe crossing can be attained. Indeed, recent work in Colombia has highlighted the enormous influence that individual stopover sites can have on migratory journeys. These findings underline an urgent need to identify Neotropical stopover regions.

Learn more about identifying the role of Neotropical habitats for migratory landbirds through this keynote delivered at the BOU Global Flyways 2023 conference. Link to video

To address this need, the Neotropical Flyways Project has the following goals:

Rapidly discover and map new stopovers sites
Determine habitat quality and stopover behavior at these sites
Develop conservation strategies at key stopover sites
Train and build capacity among in-country biologists and managers to protect sites and continue long-term monitoring.

The scope of the project currently extends to seven countries in Central and South America, including Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. In each country, we first undertake countrywide occupancy surveys to define broad scale patterns of site and habitat use, before employing capture-recapture techniques and cutting edge tracking technologies to define exactly how birds use a given stopover (see methods). To date activities have been undertaken in Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica and have led to the discovery of previously undescribed stopovers for declining species like the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Blackpoll Warbler, Canada Warbler and Cerulean Warbler.

You can support our work through the Missouri Conservation Heritage Foundation’s saving migration campaign

Neotropical Flyways Project