2.1 Migration paths and flyways

Part (a) is a photo of a Bohemian waxwing. This small bird has mainly grey-brown plumage; it has black face with a brown area along its head, just in front of its pointed crest. The area under the tail is also brown in colour and there is white and yellow edging on the wing feathers. Waxwings were given their name due to the bright red waxy tips on some of their wing feathers (visible in the enlarged photo). Part (b) is a simplified world map showing the Bohemian waxwing's main geographical ranges, with breeding range, year-round range, non-breeding range and irruption limit shown in contrasting colours. In North America, the breeding range is a band extending and progressively narrowing from Alaska across Canada to the southwest shore of Hudson Bay to the east; the year-round range is an adjacent small area of Canada, southeast of Alaska; and the non-breeding range is a band immediately south of these two regions, which extends across southern Canada and the northern states of the USA. This band is deepest towards the west, where it extends as far south as Nevada. The irruption limit is a narrow band running from southern California across to North Carolina. The Bohemian waxwing has an even larger geographical range over Russia, Europe and Asia. The breeding range extends across the southern half of Russia, down to Mongolia; the year-round range is to the west of this region and includes Finland; and the more southerly non-breeding extends as far west as England and northern France, down to the Mediterranean in the south and across to northern China and Korea to the east. Just below this region is the irruption limit, which runs from northeast Spain across Central Asia to just north of Hong Kong.

Part (a) is a photo of an adult male cuckoo. It is grey in colour with a barred patterning on its underparts. The base of the beak and the feet are yellow and the eyes are also surrounded by a yellow ring. Part (b) of this figure is a simplified map of Europe and northwest Africa which shows the migration routes of four individual cuckoos. All the routes originate in eastern England, pass through Europe and then across the Mediterranean into northwest Africa and back again.

This figure is a world map showing the three main global flyways of migratory birds. The Americas flyway comprises North and South Americas and the Caribbean. The African-Eurasian flyway comprises Greenland, Europe, western Russia, central and southern Asia down to and including the Arabian Peninsula, and all of Africa. The East Asian-Australasian flyway overlaps with the African-Eurasian flyway in central Asia and extends over the whole of Russia and Asia to the east, and down as far as and including Australasia to the south.