Moult migration of Northwest Mainland European Whooper Swans Cygnus cygnus
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Moult migration routes taken by non-breeding individuals from the Fennoscandian
subpopulation of the Northwest Mainland European Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus
population were determined by tracking swans fitted with data loggers in Lower
Saxony, Germany, during 2014. Depending on their origin, the swans flew between
a few hundred and many thousands of kilometres (maximum distance: 2,323 km),
to reach moulting sites in the Russian Arctic (at latitudes above 66.57°N) within
the Nenets Autonomous Okrug and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The
stages (distance travelled without stopping) of the moult migration were typically far shorter (mean ± s.d. = 34.9 ± 39.6 km) than those flown during spring migration (114.1 ± 133.4 km) or on autumn migration (204.6 ± 248 km). The mean flying height during moult migration (52.1 ± 47.6 m) also differed from that recorded in spring (146.8 ± 136.9 m) and autumn migrations (280.1 ± 350.5 m).
Article Details
Articles in Wildfowl volumes 1-74 and in Wildfowl Special Issues 1-7 are not licensed under Creative Commons. In these volumes, all rights are reserved to the authors of the articles respectively.
The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (which published the journal from 1948–2020 inclusive) retains a royalty-free license in perpetuity to access and use pre-2021 issues for the purposes of research, which may involve sharing with research partners from time to time.
The copyright for this paper belongs to the Author(s). Papers published in Wildfowl 75 (in 2025) and subsequent issues are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
In the articles published in these volumes, all rights are reserved to the authors of the articles respectively. This implies that readers can download, read, and link to the articles, but they cannot republish the articles. Authors can upload their articles into an institutional repository.