Arjun Kannan, M. B. Prashanth, Abhishek Samrat, Raymond H. G. Klaassen & T. Ganesh

Movement Ecology |  June 16, 2025

Migrating birds do not always travel along the shortest possible routes between breeding and wintering sites. Rather, detours are a common phenomenon in response to availability of foraging habitats, generic wind patterns, predation risk, and ecological barriers. The Himalayas are a formidable ecological barrier within the Central Asian Flyway (CAF), but hitherto research has focused on high-altitude flights of species that cross the Himalayas, and thus information on species that circumvent this mountain range is lacking in this understudied migration system.