On a 2009 hike in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona, a group of birders heard an otherworldly, ethereal bird song floating, flute-like, through the canyon. The hikers identified the singer as a brown-backed solitaire, recognizing immediately that the bird was very far from home. The brown-backed solitaire spends its life in the mountain forests of Mexico and Central America — what was it doing in Arizona?
“We had no idea what it was, but we knew it didn’t belong,” said Benjamin Van Doren, who was hiking with a birding youth group that day. “I had recordings of some thrush species from Mexico. When I played the first one, which happened to be a brown-backed solitaire, it was a perfect match.”
Then a teenager, Van Doren helped document the first accepted occurrence of the species in the United States, earning him his first scholarly publication. Now, Van Doren is an ornithologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he’s still interested in vagrants: birds that show up outside their normal range or migratory route.
He’s not alone. Most birders are excited to see and chase vagrants, especially during migration season. They represent an unusual occurrence and offer a chance to observe a species outside of its usual range, sometimes dramatically far from home.
And, for ornithologists, the presence of vagrants begs all sorts of ecological and evolutionary questions: Where did they originate? Why have these individuals deviated from their “pre-programmed” migration route? Are they really evolutionary dead-ends, as scientists have long believed? After all, if an individual flies off course and doesn’t make it back to its breeding grounds, it may never reproduce.
Inspired by his early experience with the brown-backed solitaire — and many vagrant sightings since — Van Doren worked with colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Point Blue Conservation Science to answer some longstanding questions. They recently published their work in the journal Ornithology.
Read the full article from College of ACES.
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