The road to nowhere: geolocation-by-genotype traces large-scale yellow-browed warbler vagrancy to central Siberia

Wynn, J.; Dierschke, J.; Dufour, P.; Langebrake, G.; Rollins, R.; Schmaljohann, H.; Salmon, P.; Irestedt, M.; Kunzel, S.; Bossu, C.; Ruegg, K.; Schnelle, A.; Zhao, T.; Sin, Y.; Bairlein, F.; Burnus, L.; Hosner, P.; Heim, W.; Karwinkel, T.; Jong, A.; Laine, V.; Michalik, A.; Neumann, M.; Packert, M.; Renner, S.; unsold, M.; Winkler, K.; Liedvogel, M.

doi:10.64898/2026.06.15.731303

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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.06.15.731303

The road to nowhere: geolocation-by-genotype traces large-scale yellow-browed warbler vagrancy to central Siberia

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Abstract

Vagrant animals - individuals found far outside their normal range - offer powerful natural experiments for understanding migratory mechanisms. The yellow-browed warbler (Phylloscopus inornatus) provides perhaps the best-yet example, typically migrating from Siberia to South/Southeast Asia yet found in increasingly large numbers in Western Europe. This represents a strikingly unresolved evolutionary puzzle: why do so many migrants consistently move in almost the complete wrong direction? A critical first step toward solving this enigma is determining where these birds come from. If vagrants came from the proximal western range edge this would imply simple disorientation, whilst a more easterly origin could imply large-scale reverse misorientation. Here, we develop a geolocation-by-genotype algorithm for low-coverage whole-genome resequencing data collected from feathers. Our method identifies spatially informative SNPs; clusters them to account for covariance in allele frequency through space; and employs a bootstrapped maximum-likelihood framework to estimate spatial origin with uncertainty. Applied to more than 80 European-caught birds, our results place their origin in central Siberia (118{degrees}E; 89-134{degrees}E [95% CI]); over 2000km east of the western range edge. These results suggest mass misorientation in a near-reverse direction, and highlight the yellow-browed warbler as an exceptional system for probing the mechanism, ontogeny and evolution of migration.

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Wynn, J., Dierschke, J., Dufour, P., Langebrake, G., Rollins, R., Schmaljohann, H., Salmon, P., Irestedt, M., Kunzel, S., Bossu, C., Ruegg, K., Schnelle, A., Zhao, T., Sin, Y., Bairlein, F., Burnus, L., Hosner, P., Heim, W., Karwinkel, T., Jong, A., Laine, V., Michalik, A., Neumann, M., Packert, M., Renner, S., unsold, M., Winkler, K., Liedvogel, M.. 2026-06-19. The road to nowhere: geolocation-by-genotype traces large-scale yellow-browed warbler vagrancy to central Siberia. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.15.731303

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