Recurrence, fidelity, and proximity to previously visited sites throughout the annual cycle in a trans-Saharan migrant, the Common Cuckoo

Most migratory birds return every year to the same breeding sites and some species show a similarly high fidelity to wintering grounds as well. Fidelity to stopover sites during migration has been much less studied and is usually found to be lower. Here, we investigate site fidelity and distance to previously visited sites throughout the annual cycle in the common cuckoo, a nocturnal trans-Saharan migrant, based on satellite-tracking data from repeated annual migrations of thirteen adult males. All birds (100%) returned to the same breeding grounds, with a median shortest distance of only 1 km from the locations in previous year. This was in strong contrast to a much lower and much less precise site fidelity at non-breeding sites during the annual cycle: In only 18% of the possible cases in all non-breeding regions combined, did the cuckoos return to within 50 km of a previously visited non-breeding site, with no significant differences among the main staging regions (Europe in autumn, ..., , , # Recurrence, fidelity, and proximity to previously visited sites throughout the annual cycle in a trans-Saharan migrant, the Common Cuckoo

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.r4xgxd2mv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.r4xgxd2mv)

## Description of the data and file structure

The file contains satellite-tracking data of the best daily position from 13 adult Common Cuckoos that were tracked during two, three, or four successive years, from June 2010 to February 2015 as described in Willemoes et al. 2014 and Hewson et al. 2016.

Data fields are individual ID (ID), date and time (timestamp), geographical location (location-long, location-lat), geographical identification of stopover (Stopover), stopover region (Major_Stop), duration of stopover (DaysStop), year tracked (Migration_cycle) and Argos location quality (argos:lc). If no stopover region (Major_Stop) could be assigned to a location, the cell was left empty.

Hewson, C. M., Thorup, K., Pearce-Higgins, J. W. and Atkinson, P. W. 2016. *Po...