Age-specific variation in relationship between moult and pre-migratory fuelling in Wood SandpipersTringa glareolain southern Africa

What is it about?

Birds (with exceptions) have to replace their main means of locomotion every year. The main flight feathers are pretty tatty after a year's use. This is especially true for long-distance migrants, which need to get something like 30,000 km out of a set of feathers in migration flights alone. For species that migrate to southern Africa from breeding areas in far northern Eurasia, such as the Wood Sandpiper, flight times are long, and the time available for replacement of flight feathers, and the storage of a big load of fuel for the long flight back to the breeding grounds, is constrained. This paper is about the various strategies that Wood Sandpipers use to achieve this.

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Why is it important?

The waders that migrate to coastal wetlands are far better studied than the waders that migrate to freshwater wetlands in the interior of southern Africa (of which the Wood Sandpiper is an example). On the coast, a bird does not need a strategy which enables it to cope with drought, floods and unpredictable rainfall (and therefore food supplies).

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