Migration Ecology Group

Meet Alice!

+ joined us as PhD candidate on pre-migratory flights & impacts of #pesticides on #birdmigration

+ has volunteered for multiple bird associations & participated in mig counts, passerine ringing & breeding bird surveys

+ has worked on climate change impact on bird phenology & behaviour

New Paper alert 📄

Rüppel et al. 2026 - "movetrack: An R package to model flight paths from radio-telemetry networks"
-> this makes it possible to transform station-based radiotelemetry data into actual flight path, validated with a plane flight.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A warm welcome to Alice who joined our research group as a new PhD-Student today. We are happy having you with us for the next 3 years as part of the Cluster of Excellence "Navisense".

@mguidotti29.bsky.social

Meet Matteo!

Our new @sfb1372.bsky.social songbird orientation fellow

With a background in waterbirds, he is excited to dive deeper into migration research

Originally from 🇮🇹, he is strongly motivated to contribute to various research activities & firmly believes that lunch should never be rushed

A warm welcome to @mguidotti29.bsky.social who joined our lab now as an @sfb1372.bsky.social fellow

In the next 10 months he will work on orientation 🧭
in Northern Wheatears together with @annikapeter.bsky.social

We have a new group logo - honouring one of our key study species, the northern wheatear 😍

And of cause, this bird is also tagged with a transmitter - but the tracking devices we use for our studies are so tiny, that you can´t see them on the bird 😉

Congrats to @annikapeter.bsky.social and team for successfully organising this great young researcher symposium on #magnetoreception and #animalnavigation in connection with @sfb1372.bsky.social 🥳

New study led by our @wielandheim.bsky.social uncovered negative effects of an anthropogenic fire on bird abundance and diversity during stopover:

In cooperation with RWE, we proudly announce the installation of the first #MOTUS station in an offshore wind farm (Amrumbank West) in Germany and in Europe. This will help to fill key knowledge gaps in offshore environmental monitoring. We were supported by our colleagues from Wind Energy Systems

Map showing detections of radio-tracked individual.

Skylark with radio transmitter before release.

A skylark I tagged last autumn in northernmost Germany with a #Motus transmitter (to study #pesticide effects) was now detected near our University in Oldenburg - we @migecol.bsky.social col.bsky.social now have data from 3 migration seasons for this bird!

motus.org/dashboard/#e...

#birdmigration

We’re #hiring! Our new fellowship holder Dr. Alina Sigaeva will soon be establishing her research group on #cell #physiology 🥼🔬🧪🧫 🧬of avian #magnetoreception 🐣🧭🧲. She is looking for a talented PhD student 🧑‍🎓👩‍🎓. Apply by 2 November at uol.de/job764en Please share widely!

We’re hiring a doctoral researcher in the area of migration ecology.
The work will focus on the question of how and when migratory songbirds learn where their home is using #Motus.
Part of the Cluster of Excellence NaviSense and linked with @sfb1372.bsky.social

uol.de/job788en

#ornithology

See the thread of our group member about one of our papers:

1. Yellow-browed Warbler tagged in 2025! 🤩

On September 24, @annikapeter.bsky.social tagged the first Yellow-browed warbler (Phylloscopus inornatus) on Helgoland in 2025 to study its migratory behaviour. Stay tuned for fascinating bird tracks!

#Motus #Tracking #Birdmigration

(vii) Over all species, the departure direction within the first 1-10 km does not change from Helgoland towards the coastline within 50-100 km flight distance.

(vi) departure direction from Helgoland only aligned with ring recovery directions in Redstart, Robin and Dunnock, all towards a nortwesterly direction (as expected). Wheatears depart significantly to southeast (why?) and Garden warbers depart in a random direction (why?).

(iv) the more fat the bird has, the more motivated it is to depart

(v) the more fat the bird has, the earlier the bird departs within the night

(iii) There is no difference in the time of night, when the birds depart, except, that Dunnocks depart during morning dawn and all other species during evening dusk - interestingly both at the same sun´s angle below horizon!

(ii) Trans-Saharan migrants are less selective to wind conditions for departure. All species are similarly prone to overcast, meaning they are less motivated to migrate, when the sky is cloudy

(i) stopover duration of trans-saharan migrants is shorter

Stopover departure decisions in spring: pre-Saharan migrants stay longer and are more selective for favourable wind than trans-Saharan migrants - Movement Ecology Birds that breed in Europe and winter south of the Sahara, so-called trans-Saharan migrants, generally migrate longer distances than pre-Saharan migrants. The latter are expected to be less time constrained during autumn migration than the former. As such, pre-Saharan migrants are assumed to be more selective for favourable weather conditions and are more likely to minimise energy cost of migration than trans-Saharan migrants. While this pattern is supported for autumn migration, it is less well understood for spring migration. Since the optimal arrival timing at the breeding areas is generally under selection pressure to arrive ‘early’, i.e. before ‘competitors’, and since this advantage is likely to hold across migration strategies, we predict that the general differences in decision making between pre- and trans-Saharan migrants will also be manifested during spring migration. We radio-tracked three trans-Saharan (Common Redstart Phoenicurus phoenicurus, Garden Warbler Sylvia borin and Northern Wheatear Oenanthe oenanthe) and two pre-Saharan (European Robin Erithacus rubecula and Dunnock Prunella modularis) migrants during stopover using a regional network of Motus receiving stations. We analysed the night-to-night and within-night departure decisions in relation to weather and energy stores, and compared species’ departure direction with the location of their ring recoveries. Trans-Saharan migrants stopped-over shorter and were less selective for favourable wind conditions than pre-Saharan migrants. The positive effect of high energy stores and low cloud cover on departure probability was a consistent pattern. Within-night departure times did not differ between migration strategies. Departure directions were in line with geographical mean location of ring recoveries for Common Redstart, European Robin and Dunnock. Our results suggest that pre-Saharan migrants are less time-constrained and follow an energy-saving strategy more strongly than trans-Saharan migrants that seem to have a stronger urge to migrate fast in spring. Since a similar pattern exists for autumn migration, we suggest that how the species-specific migration strategies and associated time constraints affect stopover decision making in both migration seasons is a general mechanism in migratory songbirds.

citation:
Klinner, T.*, Karwinkel, T.*, Packmor, F., & Schmaljohann, H. (2025). Stopover departure decisions in spring: pre-Saharan migrants stay longer and are more selective for favourable wind than trans-Saharan migrants. Movement Ecology, 13(1), 64. doi.org/10.1186/s404...

the 5 study species: Dunnock, Northern Wheatear, European Robin, Common Redstart, Garden Warbler

NEW PUBLICATION on stopover ecology of Songbirds during spring migration: After packmor et al. 2020 (Mov Ecol) found that trans-Saharan migrants react differently to weather for migratory departure, we aked ourselves, whether this is also valid for spring migration? 🐦
a thread 🧵 on 7 hypotheses:

Meet Lasse,

He‘ll support the working group as a volunteer for the next year, hoping to learn and observe scientific work in the process. While his interests lay elsewhere beforehand, he‘s become curios about the groups work and likes to try to think along :)

This week we were at #BESMove2025, where @giovannasandretti.bsky.social presented our results on the overlooked pre-migratory flights.
The conference title of this year was "Understanding Migration", and she came back home full of fresh insights and great new connections!

Our group is now also involved in the education of future biology teachers here at the University of Oldenburg #birdringing #birdbanding #birdmigration

Join us in the migration ecology group at the University of Oldenburg! 📡🐦🐥

A very nice #EOU2025 @eounion.bsky.social conference in Bangor, Wales, with @thiemokarwinkel.bsky.social (hosting a symposium on #MOTUS bird tracking) and @wielandheim.bsky.social (summarizing recent advances in landbird migration studies along the Asian flyways) representing our group 🕊️🐦📡

Great fun canoeing along the Wümme river near Bremen with the @migecol.bsky.social team!

Excellent food and some nice birds as well, incl. White-tailed Eagle, Black Kite, Kingfisher, Reed Buntings ...and a Cockatiel 😄 #birding

New paper on Siberian Barn Swallow migration by our group´s @wielandheim.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...