Migration: From Landbirds to Shorebirds
June 26, 2025
For over 60 years, birds have been at the heart of Point Blue’s mission. The organization was founded to study bird migration along the Pacific Flyway, and we now have the longest running population study of landbirds in North America west of the Mississippi River and the largest coordinated research network of shorebirds in the Pacific Americas Flyway.
Our avian research began by banding birds to identify individuals near our Palomarin Field Station and tracking them within our study area to better understand the hidden aspects of their lives. But birds don’t stay in one place. They fly over huge swaths of landscapes—from Northern Alaska to South America and beyond. As our organization grew, we realized that to truly understand bird migration patterns, we needed to follow them beyond California’s borders. In 2010, a solution arose when geolocator tags became small enough that we could attach them to the birds’ lower backs to track their larger movements. This major technological breakthrough allowed us to complete geolocator studies and unlocked our knowledge of where birds were going when they left California.
“We always say that birds know no borders,” said Renée Cormier, Senior Avian Ecologist. “If a population of migratory birds is declining, it could be due to factors on their summer or winter grounds and/or at important migratory stopover sites. If we don’t know where a bird is flying to, then it’s much more difficult to know what threats they are facing. Embracing new technology like geolocators has helped us be on the cutting edge of avian ecology and we now have a fuller picture of the annual cycle for many more species, which can help with their conservation.”
This new technology has been particularly impactful for understanding Swainson’s Thrushes. After placing geolocator tags on thrushes nesting along the Northern California Coast and in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade mountain ranges, we discovered that the birds from different breeding sites were going to different places. Coastal birds were migrating to western Mexico, birds nesting near Lassen National Forest were migrating to Central America, and birds in the Tahoe area were flying all the way down to South America. Longer migration routes and more recent forest loss on both the wintering and breeding grounds for the Cascade-Sierra birds compared to the coastal birds indicated that those birds may be more vulnerable than the coastal group.
Meanwhile, our search for knowledge about shorebirds, which are famous for their long migration routes, was expanding beyond the Bay Area. As we got a better sense of where the birds went during the long winter months, we knew we needed to deepen our conservation efforts in California and beyond. From salt flats to mangroves to fish nurseries, the places that support flourishing human communities also support shorebirds. That’s why the team launched MSP+ Science to Action, a program that builds on the last 13 years of the Migratory Shorebird Project (MSP) and its international network and data. Through MSP+, Point Blue provides grants to MSP partner organizations across Mexico, Central America, and South America to grow local capacity for shorebird and multiple-benefit coastal conservation and to implement science-informed conservation actions in cooperation with their local governments and communities.
“We recognized as an organization that yes, you can study birds here in California and do everything you can to support them, but if you don’t piece together that broader picture of what birds face in the places they migrate to, all of it could be for naught,” said Matt Reiter, Research Director in the Pacific Coast and Central Valley Group. “To do conservation in the most impactful way, you need to bring in the folks in the communities where these birds go. We’ve made an effort to make sure we aren’t parachuting in and saying ‘we need to do this.’ We want to make sure we’re uniting people to find a common vision that benefits everyone—not just the birds.” So far, the program has been incredibly successful, leading to new connections and projects across the Flyway.
Earlier this year, our partners at Panama Audubon hosted a workshop bringing together women from Central America who are either already engaged in bird conservation or who want to get more involved. Guests participated in an extensive three-day training where they learned how to use certain tools to study shorebirds. The training concluded with participants sharing draft proposals for how they will contribute to studying shorebirds in Central America and a meeting with the Environmental Ministry of Panama to discuss these important efforts. This type of collaboration facilitates lasting relationships that we hope will empower the local communities to protect shorebirds and their habitats over the long-term.
In Guatemala, initiative partners have collaborated with local salt producers to help them implement a modified water management system. With Point Blue’s support, small family businesses in Sipacate now have more sophisticated water control structures that have improved their salt production while supporting local shorebird populations.
Ensuring that all of these projects run smoothly requires dedicated partnerships. “Understanding migratory birds is a massively collaborative effort,” said Blake Barbaree, Senior Ecologist. “Our success truly hinges on the work of all our amazing partners. Point Blue continues to be a trusted nexus for the conservation community because we’ve brought people together and connected state agencies, volunteers, and smaller conservation organizations. We have such a strong reputation because we’ve spent decades delivering unique and important research on scales that matter. My predecessors laid this foundation and I’m lucky I’ve gotten to build on it.”