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WASHINGTON (AP) — A Gulf-breasted warbler weighs roughly fourpence, but makes an extraordinary journey twice a year. This little songbird has flown nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) between spruce forests in Canada and wintering grounds in northern South America.
“Migratory birds are these little globetrotters,” said Gildepay, senior director of the National Audubon Society’s migratory bird program.
A new online atlas of bird migration, released Thursday, draws from an unprecedented number of scientific and community data sources to illustrate the routes of some 450 bird species in the Americas, including warblers.
This bird migration explorer The mapping tool is freely available to the public and is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups collecting and analyzing bird movement data, including the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Smithsonian Center for Migratory Birds, U.S. Geological Survey, Georgetown University, Colorado State University and the National Audubon Society.
For the first time, the site will bring together online data from hundreds of scientific studies using GPS tags to track bird movement, as well as more than 100 years of bird ribbon data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey, Community Science Watch into Cornell University’s eBird platform , feather genome analysis to pinpoint the origin of birds, and other data.
“In the past 20 years, there has been a real renaissance of different technologies to track bird migrations around the world on an unprecedented scale,” said Peter Mara, an expert on bird migration at Georgetown University who worked on the project.
The site allows users to enter a species—for example, an osprey—and observe movements throughout the year. For example, data from 378 tracked ospreys appear as yellow dots moving between the North American coast and South America as the calendar bar rolls over the months of the year.
Alternatively, users can go into the city they live in and click elsewhere on the map to get a partial list of birds migrating between the two locations. For example, ospreys, bobolinks, and at least a dozen other species migrate between Washington, D.C., and Fonteboa, Brazil.
The site will continue to expand as new tracking data becomes available. The site’s program director, Melanie Smith, said the next phase of expansion would add more data on seabirds.
Washington, D.C. resident Michael Herrera started birding about four months ago and was quickly hooked. “It’s almost like a world hidden in front of your eyes,” he said. “Once you start paying attention, all these details like background noise suddenly make sense.”
Herrera said he is eager to learn more about the migration routes of mid-Atlantic waterbirds, such as great blue herons and great egrets.
Georgetown’s Mara hopes the public engagement will help highlight some of the conservation challenges the birds face, including habitat loss and climate change.
Bird populations in the U.S. and Canada over the past 50 years has fallen Nearly 30%, with migratory species facing some of the largest declines.
Follow Christina Larson on Twitter @LarsonChristina.
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