A light westerly breeze on a clear spring morning in El Saler, on the east coast of Spain, means a constant flow of migrant birds heading north over the sand dunes. On good days they pass in their thousands. Barn swallows, swifts, bee-eaters… many of them flying just over your head, so close you hear the wings cutting through the air. When I look back to my early days as a birdwatcher it is this scene that captures most vividly my experience of migration. And what made it memorable were not just the proximity and the numbers. It was the sense of being witness to a journey from distant lands in which, in the eye of the passing swallow, I was just a fleeting presence. Vast savannas, deserts, mountains and seas acquired a mythical nature. The delight in imagining those landscapes led to a desire to learn more about them. I began reading first about the Mediterranean and then about northern Europe, the Sahara and the Sahel. This website is a means to continue learning from the many individuals who, through their work, experiences and enthusiasms, are in one way or another involved with the African-Eurasian flyway—its birds, its people and its landscapes.

To launch The riddle of the flyway I have invited contributions which give a taste of some of the approaches, topics and types of articles that will be regularly featured. But before introducing each article a clarification is necessary. The approach is unashamedly eclectic and some of the articles in this website will focus on questions that apparently have little relation to birds but which, when considered in a broader context, help to think about the flyway from what scientists call a dynamic systems perspective. So along with articles about shifting migrant baselines, bird-rich trees in the Sahel, and the changing length of the wing of willow warblers, you may also find articles about the livelihoods of pastoralists in Ethiopia, the control of tiger mosquitoes in Spain, food policy in Italy, and weather systems in the Aegean. Sometimes these articles will be about ecological, political and economic processes underlying the transformation of landscapes that migrant birds depend on, and other times about how certain questions are framed, the forms of interpretation and values that influence what conservation policies we think are feasible and desirable. Ultimately, the aim is not so much to cover an impossibly long list of relevant topics but to offer a broader, more complex and dynamic view of the flyway.

Introduction to the articles

Many contributions in this website will be personal accounts by ornithologists about their research and field experiences and it is therefore fitting to start paying homage to Reginald Ernest Moreau whose seminal book The Palaeartic-African Bird Migration Systems, published posthumously in 1972, has inspired subsequent research. Ian Newton met Moreau personally while he was doing his doctoral research at Oxford and in his article he recalls the man who was his mentor and the personal circumstances in which Moreau became and worked as an ornithologist.

Learning about the life of an author can be a valuable way to start gaining a deeper understanding of their work, become aware of its complexities, put it in context and appreciate how history and personal circumstances have shaped and continue to shape what we know and how we think about the flyway and the people who live, work and conduct research there. This website will feature more articles about individuals from different countries who have contributed to our understanding of migrant birds, especially those whose work has not received proper recognition.

It is also fitting to include here an article by Juliet Vickery and William Adams that has partly inspired this website. Originally published in Oryx in 2019, the authors argue that in light of the uncertainty about the causes of decline of many migrant birds we may need to question whether pursuing detailed diagnoses before acting is a sensible strategy when some species are declining so rapidly. They suggest prioritising the assessment of initiatives and ‘natural experiments’ that could have a positive impact over a wide range of species in large geographical areas and to proceed by tinkering—using projects that replicate what seems to work in regenerating landscapes. They argue that this will require paying closer attention to indigenous forms of innovation as well as working more closely with aid and development in Africa.

One such experiment is the Sahel’s Green Wall which aims to increase the number of trees on the southern edge of the Sahara. The following article by economist Camilla Toulmin and anthropologist Ian Scoones further elaborates on this question. They warn about crisis narratives such as those of desertification used to justify a green wall and the fact that large scale government interventions are often fuelled by an obsession with single, quantifiable metrics of transformation and with little regard for the realities on the ground. An approach based on acknowledging already existing practices of soil conservation and promoting livelihoods, they argue, could deliver better results for people and the environment than grandiose schemes.

I started learning about the Sahel by reading the work of Ian Scoones and his writings led me to Camilla Toulmin, Michael Mortimore, Melissa Leach and others. This website will be featuring in detail this body of research that has highlighted the plurality of pathways to sustainability and development and the political and moral choices often tacitly presumed in these pathways.  These authors have insisted for decades on the need to rethink development in a context of growing uncertainty. Writing about the failures of mainstream development in Africa, Ian Scoones recently asked: ‘What are the alternatives? How can embracing uncertainty generate emancipatory futures and alternative imaginaries of development in Africa?’ In the answer to these questions we may perhaps find ways to address the decline of common migrant birds, not just in Africa but all along the Mediterranean, Europe and Asia.

Grand visions to regenerate landscapes in the Sahel are often justified by the claim that land degradation caused by climate change poses a security risk by fuelling political instability and human migration. This is one more element in the vision that many people in Europe have of those regions where migrant birds spend the winter. In the following article, sociologist Hein de Haas, director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford, questions this narrative. While acknowledging the undeniable severity of the climate crisis, de Haas argues that ‘The use of apocalyptic migration forecasts to support the case for urgent action on climate change is not only intellectually dishonest, but also puts the credibility of those using this argument—as well as the broader case for climate change action—seriously at risk.’ He adds that this narrative draws attention away from the political causes of most environmental hazards and displacement. The riddle of the flyway will feature more articles about this topic, including recent research on what different climate scenarios mean for the present and future conditions of life around the tropics.

For an area so closely associated with ‘natural’ disasters and forced migration it may seem paradoxical that in Europe we know so little about the refugees themselves beyond journalistic clichés deployed time and again after the latest conflict or humanitarian crisis. All too often academic writing on the topic is no better, especially certain strands of research that in their quest to identify ‘agencies’ and ‘subjectivities’ too often forget the human being. While I was co-editing a special issue of an academic journal on forced migration in 2011, the book that I found most illuminating about the realities of forced migration on the ground was actually an award winning photo essay by Alixandra Fazzina. A Million Shillings – Escape from Somalia documents the refugees’ journey from war-torn Mogadishu to Yemen across the Gulf of Aden. The situation in the Horn of Africa and Yemen has since changed but the book remains a valuable portrayal of displaced lives in a region that sits along the eastern route of the Afrotropical–Paleartic flyway and is a wintering area for species such as the Isabelline wheatear, as featured in the homepage of this website. Works like this are important for challenging conventional media representations that shape how we routinely imagine the flyway and the people who live there.

Another topic that will be featured regularly is the loss of abundance, what it means personally and culturally and how shifting baselines inform conservation targets. As an introduction to this topic, Alex Lees discusses in detail the processes underlying the decline of some common migrant passerines in the UK and notes that despite worrying trends there is scope for action. 

Climate change is amplifying the effect of other drivers of decline such as habitat quality and food availability, and altering the timing of key events in the life cycle of birds such as their arrival to their breeding grounds. Angela Turner, author of The Barn Swallow, writes about hirundines as signs of spring in the UK. Should global temperatures continue rising and should swallows stay over the winter, she argues, the magic moment of the sighting of the first swallow of the year could be lost within the lifetime of younger readers. When reading her article I wondered whether changes like this could help increase the urgency for climate action or may simply become naturalised in our experience of landscape in Britain as part of a shifting migrant baseline, the arrival of the first bee-eater gradually replacing the swallow in our celebration of spring.

Photo: The scene described at the beginning of this article is repeated myriad times every spring along the coasts of the Mediterranean. This photo is from south Sardinia. Author: Lisa van Vliet.