Bird Migration

About this book

This is a paperback reissue of  Bird Migration, which was first published in 2010.

The phenomenon of bird migration has fascinated people from time immemorial. The arrivals and departures of different species marked the seasons, heralding spring and autumn, and providing a reliable calendar long before anything better became available. This edition is produced from an original copy by William Collins.

Migration is shown by many kinds of animals, including butterflies and other insects, mammals, marine turtles and fish, but in none is it as extensively developed as in birds. The collective travel routes of birds span almost the entire globe, with some extreme return journeys covering more than 30,000 km. As a result of migration, bird distributions are continually changing in regular seasonal patterns, and on local, regional or global scales.

Migration has repeatedly prompted familiar questions, such as where birds go or come from, why do they do it, how do they know when and where to travel, and how do they find their way? In Bird Migration, Ian Newton sets out to answer these and other questions.

Bird Migration is divided into four main sections: the first is introductory, describing the different types of bird movements, methods of study, and the main migration patterns seen around the British Isles; the second part is concerned mainly with the process of migration with timing, energy needs, weather effects and navigation; the third with evolution and change in migratory behaviour; and the fourth with the geographical and ecological aspects of bird movements.

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Biography

Ian Newton is an English ornithologists, now retired, who, amongst others, has been Senior Ornithologist at the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council, Chairman of the Council of the RSPB and visiting professor of ornithology at the University of Oxford. Newton has also held the positions of President of the British Ornithologists' Union and the British Ecological Society (1994–1995). He has author several New Naturalists, including Finches (1985), Bird Migration (2010), Bird Populations (2013) and Farming and Birds (2017). He has also written two Poyser Monographs: Population Ecology of Raptors (1979) and The Sparrowhawk (1986) and several major academic titles with Academic Press, including Population Limitation in Birds (1998), Speciation and Biogeography of Birds (2003), and The Migration Ecology of Birds (2007).