The theme for World Migratory Bird Day 2025 which falls on May 10 is “Shared spaces: Creating bird-friendly cities and communities.” It doesn’t shout, but it says everything that needs to be said. Migratory birds—creatures of rhythm, wind, and open sky—are finding fewer places left to land.
As towns expand into wetlands and buildings pierce the sky, the quiet resting spots that birds once relied on disappear without notice. This year’s theme urges us to pause and look around. Cities don’t have to be sterile spaces of glass and steel. They can welcome more than just people. With intention, they can become safe harbours for the birds who pass through each year.
The message is simple: co-existence is possible, and it is urgent. Migration is never random. Birds follow invisible maps written long before we built our own. They return to the same places year after year, expecting them to still be there. When we tear down those resting grounds, we break a promise we didn’t even know we made.
The 2025 campaign calls on communities, architects, planners, and citizens to rethink space. It invites us to plant native shrubs, dim lights during migration season, and build with birds in mind. In making room for them, we restore something vital in ourselves—a sense of place, of belonging, and of stewardship.
Wings across the world
They come in silence. You don’t always hear them until they’re overhead. One moment, the sky is empty, and the next, it’s alive with wings. V-shaped formations sweep across the blue, swift and certain. These are the migrants—the long-distance fliers who travel across continents, oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges, not once in a lifetime, but twice every year.
A bird born in Alaska may winter in New Zealand. A tiny warbler from Canada may fly across the Gulf of Mexico in a single night. A sandpiper might trace a route from the Arctic Circle to the Southern tip of South America. Their journeys are written not in words, but in wind and instinct, in stars and scent. No machine could guide them better than their own bodies do.
Some weigh less than a coin. Some are hardly bigger than a man’s thumb. Yet they lift themselves on air and disappear into the sky, pushed by an ancient urge that tells them when to leave and when to return. They navigate with uncanny accuracy, returning to the same nest, the same tree, the same patch of grass, year after year. What drives them is not curiosity. It is need—need for food, for warmth, for survival. And what calls them back is something close to loyalty.
The Arctic Tern makes the longest known migration of any creature on Earth, flying from pole to pole each year. That’s a round trip of nearly 40,000 kilometres. But the miracle of migration doesn’t lie in the distance alone. It lies in the precision, the timing, and the fact that so many of these birds complete their journeys year after year, against weather, hunger, exhaustion, and odds that would humble the bravest among us.
But the skies have changed. Where wetlands once stretched quietly beside rivers, shopping malls now rise. Where thick groves used to hum with insect life, there are now highways and fences. Stopover sites—those crucial places where migratory birds rest and refuel—are vanishing.
Glass towers lure birds to fatal collisions. Light pollution turns the night sky into a maze. Pesticides poison the insects they feed on. Plastic clogs their feeding grounds. And climate change—silent but relentless—shifts the seasons, disrupts their timing, and moves the goalposts just as they arrive.
A bird that lands too early may find nothing to eat. One that comes too late may find its nesting ground already barren or too hot to support life. Some adapt. Many do not. One by one, their numbers drop. Some disappear altogether, without ceremony.
Birds are not decoration. They stitch together the web of life in ways we barely understand. They spread seeds, pollinate flowers, and control insect populations. They carry nutrients across ecosystems. They link forests to grasslands, coasts to mountains, and the far North to the deep South. They are messengers between worlds. When they vanish, something vital vanishes with them. But their story is not over. Not yet.
Action needed
People across the world are rising to meet the challenge. Conservationists are restoring wetlands, planting native trees, and campaigning to make buildings safer for birds. In some cities, skyscrapers now switch off their lights during migration seasons. Schools teach children to recognise birds not just by name, but by sound and flight pattern. Citizens band together to protect local bird habitats, even small patches of green tucked between roads.
Laws and treaties, while imperfect, are beginning to recognise the need to protect migratory routes that cross borders and time zones. Birds do not stop at national boundaries. Neither should our responsibility to them. Even small actions ripple outward. A single garden filled with native plants can offer a vital meal to a tired bird. A child taught to look up may grow into someone who defends what they once watched in awe. A city that dims its lights in spring might save thousands of lives in a single season.
There’s something deeply human about caring for creatures that may never know your name. You won’t get a thank you from a warbler. But you might hear its song outside your window. You might look up one October morning and see a flock slicing across the sky, right on time. And you’ll know you had a hand in helping them find their way. In the end, the story of migratory birds is a story about movement, connection, and return. It is about knowing where you belong and finding your way back to it, no matter how far you’ve flown. It’s about resilience in the face of distance, and trust that the world will still be waiting when you arrive.
We owe them more than silence.We owe them skies that remain open, water that remains clean, and land that remains alive. Not for their sake alone, but for our own. Because a world without birds is a world quieter, poorer, and lonelier. Because their return each year is a kind of promise—a sign that, despite everything, life still finds its rhythm.
And because when the birds stop coming, we will know something precious has been lost, not just in the air, but in ourselves.
