Are vagrant Nearctic landbirds mere victims of the weather? – a response

Are vagrant Nearctic landbirds mere victims of the weather? – a response

We thank Jon Bryant for the correspondence on our paper and for the opportunity to answer a number of questions, some of which we have also pondered historically. These key questions are: 1) Do Nearctic landbirds routinely migrate in large numbers out into the Atlantic?;2) Can we be sure that radar detections are not just Blackpoll Warblers Setophaga striata or, indeed, just shorebirds?; 3) Are at-sea bird observations off Maine and southwest of Nova Scotia irrelevant to our hypothesis of transatlantic vagrancy, as this may be a routine overwater movement?; 4) Is Newfoundland a more likely origin for vagrants than further south along the east coast of America, given the distances involved?; 5) Might misorientation be more important than wind displacement and/or disorientation in driving transatlantic vagrancy?; and 6) Might there already be ‘pseudo-vagrant’ wintering populations (i.e. small numbers but representing a regular return-migration) of some species in, for example, Bermuda?

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