Oilbirds performing non-seasonal intra-tropical migrations reduce flight effort compared to individuals that frequently return to the colony roost
Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto, Adriana A Maldonado-Chaparro, Carlos Bosque, Franz Kümmeth, Kamran Safi, Martin Wikelski · 2026
Read Oilbirds performing non-seasonal intra-tropical migrations reduce flight effort compared to individuals that frequently return to the colony roost by Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto, Adriana A Maldonado-Chaparro, Carlos Bosque, Franz Kümmeth, Kamran Safi, Martin Wikelski (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13418825.txt.
Description
Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto and colleagues compare flight effort across three movement strategies in oilbirds, fruit-eating birds that roost together in colonies. Some birds commute back to the colony often, while others wander far in the non-breeding season. The team fitted 21 adult birds with small loggers weighing 22 grams each, recording place and body motion from August 2008 to February 2009.
Night flight time served as the measure of effort for each strategy across the study months. Birds on long intra-tropical trips spent less total time in flight than colony commuters. Staying away cut the costly nightly round trips that commuting demands. The contrast shows how personal movement choices shape energy use inside one bird population.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto, Adriana A Maldonado-Chaparro, Carlos Bosque, Franz Kümmeth, Kamran Safi, Martin Wikelski |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 38 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |