Flight, interrupted

When a missile lights up the night sky over the Arabian Gulf or a drone swarm hums across the plains of Eastern Europe, the world keenly watches as airlines scramble for safe corridors. But aeroplanes are not the only objects whose paths are forcibly diverted by wars. A much older and more delicate aviation network is also thrown into crisis.

Each year in spring, billions of birds migrate North, where abundant daylight and food, combined with fewer predators, offer safe breeding grounds. As colder seasons arrive and these regions become uninhabitable, they return South to spend the winter. These flights are instinctive, refined by evolution over millennia.

Even first-time migrants travelling alone navigate expertly, guided by a genetic compass and environmental cues such as daylight, winds and the earth’s magnetic field. Many return, year after year, to the same wintering grounds or breeding sites with pinpoint precision, one of the most extraordinary feats in the natural world.

Flyways under pressure

Bird migrations happen along aerial corridors known as “flyways”, each used by a specific set of species. Along these flyways, birds often depend on a network of “stopover sites” — forests, grasslands or wetlands — where they rest and refuel before continuing journeys that are precisely attuned to seasonal changes.

During conflicts, both flyways and stopover sites are subjected to intense human disturbance. Explosions, drones and aircraft generate sustained noise and light pollution, while military infrastructure degrades key habitats. When these pressures combine, birds may become disoriented in flight and lose their way, skip critical stopover sites, or alter their migration routes. In some cases, even the invisible environment they rely on is affected. Electronic interference, such as GPS jamming or electromagnetic signals, can distort navigational cues, further complicating already demanding journeys.

A changing map

Emerging research is trying to understand these changes. For instance, satellite tracking of the endangered Egyptian vulture has shown that routes passing through parts of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region are now being used less frequently, with many birds taking a more Easterly path through Central Asia before entering South Asia. These shifts have been recorded since 2022, not directly correlated to, but coinciding with the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. In parts of West Asia, conflicts have degraded or dried up wetlands, endangering waterbirds and waders such as ducks and cranes, which use them as stopovers or wintering sites. Even small disruptions at such stopover sites can adversely impact entire migration cycles.

Corridors disrupted

To understand the gravity of these detours or skipped stopovers, one must view migration as a strict “energy budget”. Every gram of fat stored is precious fuel meant for a fixed leg of the journey. When a war forces a bird to fly extra kilometres or bypass a resting site, it creates a “sublethal effect” — factors that may not immediately kill a bird but impair its long-term ability to function. These impacts are often not immediately noticeable, accumulating over time rather than causing instant mortality.

Birds that arrive at their breeding grounds exhausted can fail to reproduce, as they lack the strength to defend their territory or produce eggs. In slow-breeding species like eagles or vultures, a single bad year may be enough to trigger a population collapse that takes decades to recover.

The crisis ripples through the ecological cycles of the regions they visit. Migratory birds provide vital services like pest control, seed dispersal, and nutrient cycling. When warfare thins their numbers, communities that rely on these services also suffer, even if the root causes are geographically distant and largely unseen. India is home to three of the nine global flyways, the Central Asian Flyway being the most prominent. Disruptions in these corridors due to hostilities elsewhere directly affect the health of the avifauna arriving in the subcontinent.

Raptors like vultures and eagles maintain ecosystem health by hunting pests and disposing of carcasses, limiting the spread of disease. If their migration is fractured, a rise in diseases may follow, or other scavengers like feral dogs may proliferate, disbalancing local ecology. Similarly, the presence of waterbirds and waders is tied to the health of Indian wetlands. These birds maintain ecological balance in habitats that support agriculture, groundwater recharge, and fisheries. If birds arrive late or in poor condition, these roles weaken, impacting the people that depend on them.

A moving crisis

Understanding these impacts, however, is increasingly difficult as the geopolitical landscape evolves. Active war zones become “no-go” areas for field research, leaving scientists to rely on remote sensing techniques that may not capture the full extent of habitat degradation or subtle behavioural changes in migratory species.

Furthermore, the rising use of electronic warfare — specifically GPS jamming and signal spoofing — is blinding our primary monitoring tools. Satellite transmitters, used to track precise movements, now face “data blackouts” in military theatres, meaning the most significant shifts in avian behaviour are unfolding exactly where we are least able to observe them, creating critical gaps in scientific understanding.

Rethinking conservation

As we look up at the sky to marvel at birds flying in V-formations, it is easy to view their arrival as a simple, timeless certainty. Yet those wings might be carrying the invisible baggage of a world at war.

Protecting them requires safeguarding critical habitats along flyways and strengthening cross-border conservation, particularly across regions where geopolitical tensions threaten to limit scientific cooperation. Addressing the environmental legacies of war must also become an integral part of post-conflict recovery efforts, ensuring that ecosystems are restored alongside communities, and that environmental monitoring is embedded into humanitarian response and reconstruction planning.

This also calls for greater investment in long-term research, improved international data-sharing, and the protection of stopover sites that serve as lifelines for migratory species. Because in protecting these journeys, we are not only conserving birds, but preserving the ecological connections that quietly sustain landscapes, livelihoods, and life itself across human borders.

— The writer is an environment activist and bird enthusiast