Bordering Migratory Shorebirds through Contested Mobility Developments
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Airports and seaports inhabit multiple geographies that dictate global mobility across political, economic, social, and environmental borders. In Australia and across the Asia-Pacific, large-scale mobility developments are being undertaken to connect local businesses and industries with global markets. However, these projects are proceeding without regard for the impacts that these mobility hubs will have on local and global ecologies. This is certainly the case across the Asia-Pacific region, where industry is impacting on the routes of migratory shorebirds along the 'East Asian-Australasian Flyway', which spans 18 countries and carries over 50 million migratory birds each year. Key sites that make up the Flyway are established and prolific hubs for these nonhuman mobilities, yet encroaching land reclamation practices are resulting in considerable avian population declines. This paper explores how more-than-human conceptualisation of the EAA Flyway and the "borders" it instigates through global conservation and nation-state governance are inadequately protecting the migratory shorebirds. We examine the recent and contested developments in Moreton Bay, in Brisbane, Australia, and the many bordering practices that take shape in this local place along the EAA Flyway. We argue that the multi-sited path that compose these global Flyways challenge our all-too-human-centric conceptions of space, borders, and movement.Keywords:
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Flapping flight is relatively costly for soaring birds such as raptors. To avoid costly flight, migrating raptors generally avoid flying over water. As a result, all but one of the global raptor migration flyways are largely over land. The East Asian oceanic flyway for raptors is the exception. Raptor species using this flyway migrate by island-hopping, flying over open ocean for distances of up to 300 km between islands. We used satellite telemetry data for grey-faced buzzards Butastur indicus , a species that dominates the southern part of the flyway, to investigate the geographical and atmospheric factors responsible for the suitability of this flyway for raptor migration. Using a combination of least-cost path analysis and a step selection function, we found that the occurrence of numerous islands and also suitable wind support along the oceanic flyway are responsible for route selection in grey-faced buzzards. These results confirm the role of islands, but also wind, in shaping the East Asian oceanic flyway of long-distance raptor migration.
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Most migratory birds depend on stopover sites, which are essential for refueling during migration and affect their population dynamics. In the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF), however, the stopover ecology of migratory waterfowl is severely under-studied. The knowledge gaps regarding the timing, intensity and duration of stopover site usages prevent the development of effective and full annual cycle conservation strategies for migratory waterfowl in EAAF. In this study, we obtained a total of 33,493 relocations and visualized 33 completed spring migratory paths of five geese species using satellite tracking devices. We delineated 2,192,823 ha as the key stopover sites along the migration routes and found that croplands were the largest land use type within the stopover sites, followed by wetlands and natural grasslands (62.94%, 17.86% and 15.48% respectively). We further identified the conservation gaps by overlapping the stopover sites with the World Database on Protected Areas (PA). The results showed that only 15.63% (or 342,757 ha) of the stopover sites are covered by the current PA network. Our findings fulfil some key knowledge gaps for the conservation of the migratory waterbirds along the EAAF, thus enabling an integrative conservation strategy for migratory water birds in the flyway.
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