Data from: 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 geographic,
temporal, and nutritional situation of the bird are required for the
internal program to properly regulate the successive segmental flight
steps of the migratory journey. This would mean that the internal/genetic
program for control of bird migration is much more dynamic and complex
than hereto assumed. The data published here is the raw data from the
multisensor data loggers that are the basis of this study (Proceedings of
the Royal Society B, doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.0958).