On a humid November evening in Chiuluan village, Tamenglong district, a team of researchers from the Wildlife Institute of India carefully approached a roosting site where thousands of Amur Falcons had settled for the night. Three birds-an adult male named Apapang, an adult female called Ahu and a young female named Alang-were about to become ambassadors for one of the planet's most extraordinary migrations.
Over the next several days, events would unfold that would fascinate ornithologists worldwide and provide groundbreaking insights into a journey that pushes to the absolute limits of avian endurance. But to understand why it matters, we have to first step back and appreciate just how improbable the Amur Falcon's annual migration really is.
Here is an update - All three satellite-tagged Amur Falcons Apapang (male), Alang (young female) and Ahu (female) are now undertaking their daring Arabian Sea crossing. Apapang has already flown nonstop for 76 hours, covering 3100 km at an average of 1000 km per day, aided by… https://t.co/9ZUV3XcKyg pic.twitter.com/QwlyMzfoGl
— Supriya Sahu IAS (@supriyasahuias) November 16, 2025
A Bird That Shouldn't Be Able to Do This
Amur Falcons (*Falco amurensis*) are not physically imposing creatures: An adult weighs between 100 and 160 grams, roughly the same as a baseball. Sleek, with their long pointed wings built for sustained flight, there's nothing about their appearance that suggests they're capable of what they actually accomplish each year.
These small raptors breed across eastern Asia, from the Amur River basin in Russia through northeastern China and into Mongolia. When autumn arrives, they don't migrate south gradually like most birds. Instead, they embark on a 22,000-kilometer odyssey that takes them across the entire breadth of Asia, over the Indian subcontinent, straight across 3,000 kilometers of open ocean, and finally into southern Africa. Then, when the seasons shift again, they do it all in reverse.
Just raw numbers don't capture the absurdity of this. Picture a creature weighing less than a cup of coffee that could fly three days and nights continuously over the Arabian Sea without rest, food, or water. Picture doing this while managing an average of almost 1,000 kilometers per day. Now picture being small enough that a strong headwind would blow you off course, yet somehow navigating with precision across continents you've never seen before.
This is what Amur Falcons do every single year.
Why Three Birds are being tracked?
Satellite telemetry has transformed our understanding of migratory species, but it's not as easy as just strapping a GPS to a bird and watching where it goes. The transmitters must be lightweight enough not to hamper flight—usually no more than 3-5% of the bird's body weight. For an Amur Falcon, that is a device weighing about 3.5 grams, including its solar-powered battery and transmission hardware.
These tiny transmitters, with a harness system designed to distribute weight and avoid interfering with flight mechanics, were fitted onto Apapang, Ahu, and Alang by the WII team on November 11, 2025. Within hours, the birds were released, and by the next morning, the first location pings were coming through.
It was not an arbitrary choice of the three. Apapang, a male adult, would likely take the most direct route; males are often at the forefront of waves of migration. Ahu, a female adult with experience, would possibly take a more cautious route, probably stopping to feed more often. Alang, probably on her first or second migration, would show whether young birds instinctively take certain routes or learn them from others.
What data showed over the following days exceeded even optimistic expectations.
Passage to India by
The departure of the falcons from Manipur marked the beginning of what ornithologists were already calling one of the most closely monitored wildlife migrations in recent memory. Real-time tracking data meant that researchers could monitor the birds' progress on an hourly basis, watching them navigate one of Earth's most densely populated and geographically diverse regions.
Apapang took a route that carried him southwest over several Indian states, eventually passing over Velas in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district. Ahu and Alang chose routes slightly differently: crossing near Virar and Malvan respectively. The variation in routes is significant-it suggests that the Amur Falcons do not follow a single narrow corridor but instead use broad-front migration across India.
This matters enormously for conservation. If the falcons depended on a single path of flight, it would be easy but dangerous to protect that corridor-an interruption at any point in the route could prove catastrophic. The fact that they spread out over broad areas means that the conservation efforts must also be spread out, but the species has redundancy built in against challenges that are strictly local.
India has become a crucial stopover for hundreds of thousands of Amur Falcons each autumn. In northeastern states such as Nagaland, Manipur, and Telangana, the birds congregate in almost unimaginable numbers. According to estimates, over a million falcons pass through Telangana during peak migration, putting up a spectacle that attracts birders from the world over.
These stopovers serve a critical function. After their long flight from breeding grounds, the falcons need to rebuild fat reserves for what comes next. They gorge on insects—termites, dragonflies, beetles, anything they can catch—packing on the energy reserves that will carry them across the ocean.
Three Days Over Water
By around November 15, satellite data showed all three falcons approaching India's west coast and then, without delay, continuing out over the Arabian Sea.
What comes next is hard to imagine. With few exceptions, these birds flew day and night for about 76 hours: that is, over three days and four nights, continuously with no stops on vessels or oil platforms, no stops on the water, just unrelenting, constant flight driven by the fat reserves they had amassed in India and good tailwinds.
The crossing of the Arabian Sea is the most extreme phase of Amur Falcon's migration. At an approximate 3,000 kilometers, this represents one of the longest non-stop overwater flights that birds of its size undertake. The energetic cost is staggering. Studies of similar trans-oceanic migrations in other species suggest that birds can lose up to 50% of their body mass during these crossings, burning through fat reserves at rates that would cause organ failure if sustained much longer.
Wind is everything. The falcons time their crossing to coincide with favorable monsoon-transition winds, which provide tailwind assistance. A slight miscalculation might prove fatal: Headwinds would force the birds to expend more energy than their reserves allow, while storms might blow exhausted falcons off course with no hope of recovery.
It must have been agony for the research team, watching the satellite data come in during those 76 hours. Every new ping confirmed the birds were still in the air, still on course, still pushing forward. By the 18th, all three had reached the Somali coast. They'd made it.
From Hunters to Guardians
The story of Amur Falcon conservation in India is remarkable precisely because it represents such a dramatic reversal. Not long ago, northeastern Indian states were sites of mass slaughter during migration season. Tens of thousands of falcons were killed—trapped with nets, shot from the sky, sold in markets.
The killing was on an industrial scale. In 2012, conservationists documented carnage in Nagaland that may have claimed 120,000-140,000 birds in a single season. For a species making such a perilous journey, such losses were simply unsustainable.
What changed? A combination of factors: enforcement of wildlife protection laws, education campaigns in schools and villages, economic incentives through ecotourism, and perhaps most importantly, community engagement that gave local people ownership of conservation efforts.
Chiuluan village, where the three falcons were tagged, embodies such a change. Villagers who once joined in falcon hunting now help support research and monitoring. They've outlawed airguns, post no-hunting signs, and take pride in hosting what they now realize are honored guests, not prey.
This transition did not occur overnight, nor was it simply brought about by external intervention. It entailed relationship-building, economic alternatives, and a demonstration that living falcons could bring more value—through tourism, scientific collaboration, and international recognition—than dead ones could provide.
This would not have been possible without the grassroots support for the 2025 tracking project: to capture and tag wild birds, local knowledge about roosting sites, community acceptance of research activities, and continuous cooperation in monitoring and protecting the falcons were required.
What Does the Data Say?
But beyond the drama of the journey itself, the satellite tracking provides invaluable scientific insight. Every location ping, every altitude reading, every speed calculation adds to our understanding of how these birds accomplish what they do.
Mean speeds close to 1,000 km/day during the crossing of the Arabian Sea provide information about flight efficiency and wind assistance. The variation in routes across India indicates flexibility in navigation and stopover site selection. The precise timing of ocean crossing, coinciding with seasonal wind patterns, speaks to sophisticated environmental awareness.
Perhaps most riveting of all, the data show us what we don't know. Why do individuals take different routes? How do first-year migrants like Alang know where to go, in the absence of more-experienced guides? What cues prompt initiation of the ocean crossing? How do the birds navigate at night, over featureless water, and possibly through clouds that obscure both stars and landmarks?
Every answer begets new questions, but taken together they start to paint a more whole picture of migration ecology. And it matters, not just for Amur Falcons, but for understanding migration more broadly: the physiological limits of endurance flight, the evolutionary pressures that shape migratory behavior, the environmental factors that make such journeys possible or impossible.
Threats on the Horizon
While that 2025 migration of Apapang, Ahu, and Alang was successful, bigger challenges come. Climate change alters wind patterns and shifts the timing of the seasons. It makes the weather more unpredictable, which could put migrating birds in vulnerable positions. The loss of habitat on both Asian breeding grounds and African wintering areas threatens this population. Insect populations globally are decreasing due to pesticide use and environmental degradation, and the falcons primarily feed on them.
Even with increased protection in India, the falcons still face dangers elsewhere along the route. Not every country has the same level of conservation infrastructure and community engagement; some places remain hotspots for hunting and trapping.
The intrinsic vulnerability of migration compounds these threats. Unlike resident species, which can adapt to localized changes, migrants depend on conditions being favorable across thousands of kilometers. A problem anywhere along the route—food scarcity at a stopover, storms during the ocean crossing, habitat loss at the destination—can affect the entire population.
Beyond Science
There's something profound about tracking these three individual birds across such vast distances. In an age where wildlife often feels abstract-populations declining in statistics, habitats lost to satellite imagery-following Apapang, Ahu, and Alang made their journey immediate and personal.
People all around the world followed the tracking data, checking obsessively for updates during the Arabian Sea crossing, celebrating when the birds reached Africa. Social media lit up with hashtags and real-time maps. Schoolchildren in Manipur tracked "their" falcons. Birders in Somalia waited on beaches, hoping for a glimpse.
This matters more than it might seem: Conservation ultimately succeeds or fails based on whether people care enough to make difficult choices—protecting habitat instead of developing it, enforcing laws instead of ignoring them, investing resources instead of cutting budgets. Stories like this generate the emotional connection that makes those choices possible.
The Journey Continues
Tracking in November 2025 captured just one phase of the Amur Falcon's annual cycle. From Somalia, Apapang, Ahu, and Alang would continue south, bound for southern Africa, where they will spend several months before the entire journey reverses itself.
Researchers hope the transmitters continue operating for a number of migration cycles and thus show not only the outbound journey but the return trip as well, plus the behavior during the breeding season, and, if possible, the entire annual cycle repeated over several years. Long-term tracking of individual birds provides information impossible to obtain in other ways: do falcons use the same routes every year? Do they return to the same breeding and wintering sites? How does survival differ between the various age classes and sexes? The data streaming in from three small transmitters represents just the beginning. As technology improves and more birds are tagged, our understanding will deepen. Ideally, this knowledge translates into more effective conservation: protected stopover sites, reduced hunting pressure, habitat preservation in critical areas, international cooperation spanning the falcons' entire range. What We Owe Them The migration of the Amur Falcons-and all migratory species, for that matter-represents something increasingly rare: a truly wild phenomenon operating on a scale that dwarfs human timescales and borders. They do not recognize national boundaries or political divisions. They simply go to where they need to go, following routes refined over many generations and responding to environmental cues we're only beginning to understand. There's a certain humility required in acknowledging that creatures weighing less than a cup of coffee can accomplish feats of endurance and navigation that we, despite all our technology, can barely comprehend. The least we can do is ensure they have safe passage. The transformation of communities in Manipur and Nagaland from hunters to protectors offers hope that such a future is indeed possible. The successful tracking of Apapang, Ahu, and Alang has shown that science can light the way ahead. All that remains is the will to follow through-to protect habitat, to enforce laws, to support communities, and to sustain the commitment needed over long periods of time for conservation to succeed. These three falcons made their journey successfully in the year 2025. Whether their descendants can do so in 2050, in 2075, or in 2100 depends entirely on choices we make now. Their wings carried them across continents; it is only up to our decisions whether they will carry them into the future.
