As autumn takes hold, birds are either on the wing or are preparing to leave for their wintering grounds. Billions of songbirds, shorebirds, and raptors will pour southward along established flyways at a staggering scale – on a single night in October 2025, an estimated 1.25 billion migrating birds were recorded by the Cornell Lab’s BirdCast project (Haikubox owners can get their migration forecast). Along the route, birds face danger from window collisions, tall buildings and towers, disorienting light pollution, habitat loss at stopover sites, predators, and storms. The good news is that simple actions, including turning off unnecessary outdoor lighting during peak migration nights and treating windows to reduce collisions, protect the birds in your neighborhood. Establishing native plants in your landscaping provides seeds and habitat for birds seeking a resting spot along their route, giving you a great opportunity to spot feathered travelers.
A new hazard impacting bird migration is the changing climate which is altering when birds leave, how they fare along the way, and what they find when they arrive. Researchers are trying to understand how environmental changes may alter migration for individual species and the habitats upon which they rely. For example, researchers used passive acoustic monitoring (Haikubox is a passive acoustic monitor, too!) during autumn migration in degraded wetland, farmland and forest habitats to learn how birds used stopover spots which are increasingly threatened by human disturbance.