Migration of Thought

Recently I made a post on my Instagram account with a caption that mentioned perspective shifts as a necessary tool of realisations. Not Realisation, but realisations. Realisation as a proper noun is the pathless path and is not the topic of this article. It was this post, with its sentiments lingering in the corners of my psyche, combined with the preparation of another article on bird migration that really got me thinking about the words we use to describe the birds we love to see move across the planet.

Migration links us all. It is a process by which unfathomable biomass gets shifted over horizons and hemispheres, across borders replete with stationed agents, unfriendly fences, and explosive tensions. Birds look down on us, surely, as they take deep breaths in the clouds, cruising for days on end. We used to think that they would simply eat until they get as fat as they could possibly get, and then fly south when it gets too cold. How did they know where south was? Maybe they followed the sun at its zenith? We didn't even know birds migrated until someone saw a White Stork in Europe that arrived there with an embedded African spear. We now know that birds know exactly when to migrate, and to where they must fly. They know exactly how much they need to eat to traverse specific distances. We know that they do not simply "get fat", but selectively retain specifics such as chest muscles and heart while shrinking other organs in a process known as autophagy.

In writing my article on migration, I considered a common and familiar species, the Spotted Sandpiper. I noted that this bird - along with several other shorebirds, warblers, and others - would actually spend the majority of its time in the tropics, venturing north only to breed for a few short weeks each year. That now, combined with the memory of reading about these species as "winter visitors", or "non-breeding migrants" had me feeling a little conflicted.

If someone - whether animal or human - spends eight months of the year in one particular location, with the remaining four months somewhere else, then which of these lands forms the "resident range" of the species?

This then spurred me on a search through the various field guides for species' descriptions, in particularly those relating to our beloved Spotted Sandpiper. Field guides for T&T list the Spotted Sandpiper as a "very common visitor" (ffrench) and "common non-breeding visitor" (Kenefick et al.), while National Geographic's Complete Birds of North America lists the Spotted Sandpiper as "North America's most widespread breeding sandpiper".

While the statement made of it being North America's most widespread breeding sandpiper may be wholly true, it begs entrance to a different conversation - that of a sense of ownership, especially juxtaposed against the text existing in the field guides for a lowly tropical country such as T&T. It may seem to some as "reading too much" into things, but there is a subliminal sense of inferiority that some supposedly innocuous facets of information can communicate.

Extrapolating this concept a bit, I decided to have a look at some of the austral migrants which occasionally appear within T&T. Both Swallow Tanager and Plumbeous Kite, for example, are described as "breeding visitors" to T&T. I had, of course, internalised this fact and have used it in many of my talks describing the avifauna of these islands. Comparing this to the description of the Spotted Sandpiper, I am now wondering how can some species be breeding visitors to T&T, but others are non-breeding visitors, despite spending most of the year in these climes.

The question arises therefore, are birds like the Spotted Sandpiper visiting tropical climates, or are they tropical birds who visit temperate regions only to breed? Perhaps they are "a widespread breeding visitor to North America"?

I understand that the majority of birding texts are historically northern-centric, a fact not dissimilar to nor separate from to the inherent patriarchy within ornithology. It is simply where we have come from. Knowing this is only half the story, the other half is carving our path forward. With an increasing number of birders, guides, and ornithologists from the global south, coupled with a greater awareness of the gross injustices of the past, it may be high time to shift our perspective on birds, hopefully learning some lessons along the way.

Spotted Sandpiper, probably laughing at us for our feeble attempts to continually categorise everything.