Flyway

Nine major flyways are internationally recognized, including the East Atlantic, Central Asian, and East Asian-Australasian flyways. Each is shaped by geography: mountain barriers, sea crossings, and desert gaps create bottlenecks where hundreds of millions of birds concentrate. International flyway partnerships coordinate conservation along entire routes because a species threatened at a single staging area — such as shorebirds at Yellow Sea intertidal flats — suffers range-wide population declines regardless of conditions at other sites.