It is known that night-migratory songbirds use a magnetic compass measuring the magnetic inclination angle, i.e. the angle between the Earth's surface and the magnetic field lines, but how do such birds orient at the magnetic equator? A previous study reported that birds are completely randomly oriented in a horizontal north-south magnetic field with 0° inclination angle. This seems counter-int...

Cryptochromes are ubiquitously expressed in various animal tissues including the retina. Some cryptochromes are involved in regulating circadian activity. Cryptochrome proteins have also been suggested to mediate the primary mechanism in light-dependent magnetic compass orientation in birds. Cryptochrome 1b (Cry1b) exhibits a unique carboxy terminus exclusively found in birds so far, which migh...

Long-distance migratory birds are often considered extreme athletes, possessing a range of traits that approach the physiological limits of vertebrate design. In addition, their movements must be carefully timed to ensure that they obtain resources of sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy their high-energy needs. Migratory birds may therefore be particularly vulnerable to global change pro...

Modeling migratory paths of birds is an emerging area of complexity science in which attracts interdisciplinary collaborations from ornithologists, computer scientists, epidemiologist, and policy makers. However, due to the unpredictability of climate and habitat changes, our understanding of bird migratory paths is still limited. Not accounting for environmental changes when modeling bird migr...

The origin of recent parallel outbreaks of the high pathogenicity H5N8 avian flu virus in Europe and in Japan can be traced to a single source population, which has most likely been spread by migratory birds. By using Bayesian coalescent methods to analyze the DNA sequences of the virus to find the times for divergence and combining this sequence data with bird migration data we can show the mo...

Songbird migrants use stopovers between flight bouts to rest and refuel for the upcoming flights. Behaviours affecting where, when and how long to stay at stopover sites will affect how successful the overall migration will be, which has significant consequences for the overall fitness and mortality of the birds. The main purpose of this work was to investigate stopover behaviours in free-flyin...

Body condition (i.e. relative mass after correcting for structural size) affects the behaviour of migrating birds, but how body condition affects migratory performance, timing and fitness is still largely unknown. Here, we studied the effects of relative body condition on individual departure decisions, wind selectivity, flight speed and timing of migration for a long-distance migratory shorebi...