‘Birds know no borders’: Interview with BirdLife Africa’s Alex Ngari

Alex Ngari of BirdLife Africa spoke to Mongabay ahead of the Global Flyways Summit about the scattershot state of knowledge on bird migration routes between Europe, Asia, and Africa. He flagged Lake Chad, the Tana River Delta, the Nyabarongo Wetlands, and the Bijagós Archipelago as critical stopover sites under threat from agriculture, dams, overfishing, and rising seas. Lake Chad alone has lost 90% of its area.

Ngari explained that tracking has historically relied on leg-ringing, a system dependent on strangers finding a banded bird and knowing what to do about it. Newer electronic tags help, but remain too costly and bulky for many small species, leaving BirdLife with 471 priority sites identified continent-wide and still large gaps in what happens to birds between them.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.