Dear Motus folks,
See our new publication about stopover ecology of songbirds:
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. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-025-00575-0
as we made all code and analysis freely available, it might also work as inspiration what you can do with motus data!
here is very small summary of the Publication:
After Packmor et al. 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-020-0193-1) showed, that the stopover ecology of the trans-Sahara migrant shows more time constrained behaviour, i.e. shorter stopover and more independence of weather, the question was, whether this behaviour is also seen during spring migration. Despite the trans Saharan migrants (Wheatear, Garden Warber + Common Redstart) being already passed the Sahara in spring on Helgoland, they still show this signs of time constrain, compared to the pre-Saharan migrants (Robins + Dunnocks):
(i) stopover duration of trans-saharan migrants is shorter
(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
(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
(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
(vi) departure direction from helgoland only aligned with ring recoveries in Redstart, Robin and Dunnock, all towards a nortwesterly direction (as seasonally expected). Wheatears depart significantly to southeast (why?) and Garden warbers depart in a random direction (why?)
(vii) Over all species, the departure direction does not change from Helgoland towards the Coastline over 50-100 km