Paul Dufour is a researcher at the Swiss Ornithological Institute. His research explores how bird movements evolve and contribute to eco-evolutionary processes. His recent work focuses on vagrancy events, aiming to understand their underlying causes and how lost individuals could act as pioneers in establishing new migration routes.
Vagrant birds were historically neglected in research due to their rarity and the limits of earlier tracking methods. Yet growing research shows that vagrancy can influence eco-evolutionary processes and help us better understand several aspects of bird migration. In this talk, I will present the progress of several research projects focused on Siberian bird species that are occurring with increasing frequency in Europe, along with the key questions we aim to address. Some of these projects aim to uncover why many individuals in certain species take a wrong direction at the start of migration, and what this can teach us about the navigation systems of migratory birds. Other projects aim to assess whether such vagrant individuals could act as pioneers in the establishment of new migration routes and we will see that identifying the emergence of a new route is not always straightforward.
