Follow your leader

Male Caspian Tern parents lead the way

- Byholm P

Adult male Caspian Terns teach their young the secrets of migration.

GPS tracking of Caspian Terns -has shown that male parents bear the main responsibility for leading their young during their first migration from the Baltic Sea to Africa.

Bird migration has fascinated humans for millennia. How do these creatures learn to find their way to distant wintering locations? In a new study, a team of researchers from Finland, Sweden and the UK tracked entire bird families with GPS devices to find out.

'We wanted to get a better idea of how the migratory skills of birds are passed from one generation to the next in a species where individuals normally migrate together, says lead author Patrik Byholm of the University of Helsinki.