The welfare challenges facing migratory birds during their extraordinary annual journeys, including habitat loss, collision risk, light pollution, and climate change disruption.
Migratory birds experience extraordinary physiological and behavioral demands during their annual journeys — building fat reserves, navigating thousands of miles, finding food at stopover sites, and arriving at breeding or wintering grounds in condition to reproduce. Human-caused threats at every stage of migration create both individual suffering and population-level declines that threaten ecological stability. Building strikes cause sudden traumatic death or injury for hundreds of millions of birds annually; survivors of non-fatal collisions may suffer neurological damage, dislocation, or starvation. Light pollution kills millions of birds by causing disorientation, window strikes, and exhaustion. At stopover sites, habitat loss forces birds to land in suboptimal locations where food is scarce, causing starvation and exhaustion. Climate change disrupts the phenological synchrony that migratory birds depend upon — arriving to find insects or flowers absent. Addressing these threats requires policy change, building design reforms, and individual actions collectively implemented at scale.