Birds are always adapting to their changing environment. They evolved to raise their young when and where food is most abundant in springtime and by summer’s end when chicks are ready to fly, birds of many species must relocate to survive. When and where they stop along the way can mean life or death. At Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Southwest Florida, Audubon has been working to preserve the habitats birds rely on for their breeding, migration, and other essential needs.

The Sanctuary is proving to be an important spot along many birds’ migratory paths, especially in the fall. Motus wildlife tracking stations around the world detect radio signals emitted by tiny antennae that scientists apply to birds they have captured and tagged under federal permits. A Motus station at the Sanctuary has detected 30 individual birds within its 12-mile radius since it was installed in 2022—all but three were recorded in August, September, or October.

During the week of October 9, 2024, the week Hurricane Milton made its Florida landfall roughly 100 miles northwest of the Sanctuary, the Corkscrew station detected eight birds. According to Motus network data, four of those birds were thrushes that researchers tagged at their breeding locations in northern North America.

Two Swainson’s Thrush were tagged in Vancouver, British Colombia – one later recorded by a Motus station in Guatemala.

Another Swainson’s Thrush, tagged by scientists with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) as part of their Mansfield Songbird Research Project, was detected in Belize the day after it passed by the Corkscrew station.

Swainson’s Thrush breed across northern North America, mostly in Canada, and spend winters in Central and South America, typically flying south over Peninsular Florida along the way. With a variety of insects and berries in their diet year-round, thrushes rely on forested habitats in both breeding and wintering locations.

Desirée Narango, PhD, a conservation scientist with VCE, oversees a study that uses Motus to analyze bird survival across the seasons (breeding, fall migration, wintering, or spring migration).

“Studying the risks for our birds and understanding where mortality is highest will help guide where we are likely to have the biggest conservation impact,” says Dr. Narango.

Every year, Narango’s team makes weekly visits to the top of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont to study the survival and productivity of high-elevation birds, primarily Bicknell's Thrush. In 2024, they also applied tags on Swainson's Thrush and White-throated Sparrows to get some preliminary data.

Narango says the bird detected by Corkscrew’s station was a male Swainson's Thrush originally captured in 2023.

“It was a second-year individual, arriving at our field site to set up his first breeding territory. We recaptured him in 2024 and applied the Motus tag during one of our last visits to the mountain in August,” Narango says, adding that her team looks forward to seeing him return in the spring.

Until recently, tracking birds on their migratory paths was a lot like finding a needle in a haystack. While human activities around the globe continue to reduce, degrade, or eliminate their habitats, it is more important than ever that we understand their migratory needs to better guide land stewardship practices—for birds, people, and the planet.

In addition to informing bird conservation policies and filling knowledge gaps across the broader scientific community, this data can inform land managers about birds’ seasonal habitat preferences and the roles that the places they manage play as stopover points or as winter destinations. While the Sanctuary’s conservation team continues to restore wetlands that many birds need during migration and as year-round habitat, Audubon is restoring wetlands on behalf of people and birds at a hemispheric scale.

Learn more about the migratory path of Swainson's Thrush and other birds at the Bird Migration Explorer website.