Scientists continue to make astounding discoveries about the navigational and physiological feats that enable migratory birds to cross immense oceans or fly above the highest mountains, go weeks without sleep or remain in unbroken flight for months at a stretch. Scott Weidensaul, author of A World on the Wing(2021), takes us around the globe — with researchers in the lab probing the limits of what migrating birds can do, to the shores of the Yellow Sea in China, the remote mountains of northeastern India where tribal villages saved the greatest gathering of falcons on the planet, and the Mediterranean, where activists and police are battling bird poachers — to learn how people are fighting to understand and save the world’s great bird migrations.

Scott Weidensaul’s field research focuses on bird migration. He is a co-director of Project Owlnet, a collaborative effort among over 100 banding and research stations across North America studying owl migration. Weidensaul co-founded Project SNOWstorm, which uses cutting-edge tracking technology to study Snowy Owls, and is a founder of the Critical Connections project, which is tracking the migration of birds that breed on National Park lands in Alaska. He is also part of a continental effort to understand the rapid evolution, by several species of western hummingbirds, of a new migratory route and wintering range in the East. He co-founded the Northeast Motus Collaboration, which is creating a network of nearly 150 automated telemetry receivers across the mid-Atlantic region and New England to track the movements of bats, insects and small birds.

The event was made possible by Golden Gate Audubon, Ohlone Audubon, Santa Clara Valley Audubon, Marin Audubon, Sequoia Audubon, San Joaquin Audubon.