Book Review of, Bird Migration: a New Understanding

Published In

Wilson Journal of Ornithology

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

9-1-2023

Abstract

Bird migration has fascinated humans for millennia, and although we've come a long way since some authorities seriously entertained the notion that swallows overwintered as torpid animals in crevices, in the mud at the bottom of ponds, or even migrated between the earth and moon (Birkhead 2008), we're still struggling to discern its evolutionary origins. For most of us born and raised in the northern hemisphere, we were taught (or simply assumed) that the answer was obvious: “our birds” left for warmer southern regions to escape almost certain death in the cold and snowy months of winter (the “northern home hypothesis”). But by the 1980s as Neotropical ornithology rose to prominence, an alternative view, that migrants dispersed out of tropical America to seasonally populate North America, became the dominant paradigm. The fitness advantage generated by the ability to exploit large seasonal pulses of food, combined with depressed population size in the north resulting from high overwinter mortality, made the temporary invasion of the north worth the risk and effort of a long migratory flight (the “southern home hypothesis”). But like virtually every area of ornithology, molecular biology became a tool to assist in unraveling the roots of migration. Detailed mapping of migratory behavior on robust molecular phylogenies became wedded to the idea that migratory behavior evolved very early in the history of the Neoaves (and possibly earlier), is latent in all birds, and involves a suite of genes influencing the multifaceted set of traits required for successful migration. This view has its origins in the study of insect migration, but is now widely applied to birds, and is known as the migratory syndrome. A cornerstone of the migratory syndrome hypothesis is that reference to the evolution of migration in modern taxa does not refer to de novo evolution but instead represents the turning on or off of the anciently evolved traits—the “management” of migration, if you will, through the operation of “migratory switches” (Zink and Gardiner 2017). The migratory syndrome hypothesis requires a shift in temporal perspective, and forces us to consider that the migratory systems that we now observe may have their origins not in the Pleistocene, but as far back as the late Oligocene to early Miocene (15 to 25 million years BP). The north, by some accounts (Winger et al. 2014, 2019), is the origin of migration for at least some Neotropical migratory systems. But not all agree.

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Copyright © 2023 BioOne

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https://doi.org/10.1676/23-00061

DOI

10.1676/23-00061

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41672

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