The structure of the annual migratory flight activity in a songbird

Migratory songbirds have an internal circannual genetic program that controls the timing and extent of migratory flight activity, as demonstrated by experiments with birds held in cages. We used multisensor loggers to record the timing and duration of all migratory flights during the annual cycle of 15 free-living individuals of red-backed shrikes Lanius collurio. Annual actograms unexpectedly revealed that the nocturnal migratory flights of the shrikes were organized in a highly structured way with flights aggregated into segments that could be readily identified for all individuals, showing low variability and thus high consistency between individuals. These results suggest that the execution of migratory flights is under a high degree of control according to a rather detailed internal travelling plan for the annual migration cycle. Potentially, the control of migratory flight under natural conditions depends on at complex feed-back process where external cues associated with the geog..., , # Data from: The structure of the annual migratory flight activity in a songbird

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.gqnk98szz](10.5061/dryad.gqnk98szz)

## Description of the data and file structure

**Data from:** **The structure of the annual migratory flight activity in a songbird**

Contains annual multi sensor datalogger data from 15 individual red-backed shrikes and all code that was used for the publication (doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.0958).

### Files and variables

#### File: Redbacked_shrikes_activity_and_pressure.txt

**Description:**  Data file in plain text containing detailed accelerometer and pressure data (when available) for the different red-backed shrikes. The data included in this file is the raw data that all other files, analyses and figures are based on. Empty cells represent missing data. 

##### Variables

* ind: indicates individual Logger ID
* Activity date & time: timestamp
* acc[0]: number of sequences that scored 0 during the preceding hour (12 measurement sequences)...,