An unexpected route into migration research
At BirdEyes, we nurture talent across the flyways. We bring together PhD students and early-career researchers with different backgrounds, nationalities and skills. Meixu Chen is one of these researchers. Her journey with BirdEyes began in 2023 with a question and a chance carpool ride to an IWSG conference. That question eventually grew into her first scientific publication. The study was published in Behavioral Ecology on 3 August 2026. It explores how Eleonora’s falcons adjust their journeys across the Indian Ocean according to seasonal conditions.
On the way to the conference on the German island of Sylt, Meixu met Wouter Vansteelant. At the time, she was looking for a master’s thesis project. Later, she approached Theunis Piersma at the conference to ask about possible projects. He led her straight back to Wouter.
Meixu had not followed a conventional path into ornithology. Her background combined ecology and forestry with a master’s in island sustainability. She was fascinated by birds but had relatively few opportunities to work directly on bird research. What she did bring was a question about birds and islands:
“I thought that if birds encountered islands during a long-distance flight, they would use them rather than simply fly past.”
The question connected naturally with earlier research by Wouter and Laura Gangoso. Their work focused on Eleonora’s falcons migrating across the western Indian Ocean to Madagascar.
The same ocean, two different journeys
Meixu and her collaborators analysed 83 ocean crossings made by 19 Eleonora’s falcons between 2012 and 2022. In spring, the falcons followed longer, slower routes and used islands more frequently, while their autumn journeys were more direct. Wind conditions played an important role, with even tiny islands providing opportunities to interrupt a journey when conditions became less favourable.
The findings showed Meixu that migration was more complicated than she had initially imagined. The project also taught her how to turn a broad idea into a focused research question. Working with Wouter, she learned to move between questions, figures and analyses, using each to sharpen the others.
His guidance also shaped how she thinks about academia. “Being a good academic is not only about producing excellent research, but also about taking students and their developing ideas seriously,” Meixu reflects.
From migration patterns to learning how to migrate
The falcon study also opened new questions. Meixu became interested not only in describing migratory patterns, but in understanding how birds acquire the information and experience behind their decisions.
Her PhD now asks how such strategies develop in the first place. Working with Eurasian spoonbills, whimbrels and black-tailed godwits, she investigates how juvenile birds combine independent exploration with social information and gradually establish stable migratory routes as adults. Her first publication therefore marks not only the completion of one project, but the beginning of the questions she is now pursuing as a PhD researcher at BirdEyes.
