Fine-scale flight behaviour reveals eagles’ response to different uplift sources and highlights observational gaps in high-resolution weather models

Understanding how animals respond to their physical environment requires environmental observations at the scale at which behavioural decisions are made. For soaring birds, the coarse resolution of weather products has long hindered the analysis of their behavioural response to fine-scale atmospheric dynamics, forcing uplift sources to be inferred largely from behaviour itself. Here, we combined high-resolution movement data from 24 golden eagles with the kilometre-scale COSMO weather model. We first classified thermal, orographic, and gravity-wave uplifts using independent atmospheric predictors and then quantified the birds’ use of each uplift type and their fine-scale behavioural responses. Eagles relied predominantly on thermals, but opportunistically adjusted their use of uplift sources seasonally. The birds’ flight behaviour could not reliably indicate which uplift type was primarily used, and thus suggests that both atmospheric processes and behavioural responses are better described as continua than discrete categories. Finally, we compared vertical wind velocities derived from eagles soaring behaviour with those modelled by the COSMO weather model, showing that most of the thermals exploited by eagles remain unresolved at kilometre-scale model resolution. Our results demonstrate how high-resolution weather models provide new insights into bird movement decisions, while also highlighting the potential of soaring birds as biologically embedded atmospheric sensors that could help closing the resolution gap in atmospheric models.