Abstract
Migratory orientation of many animals is inheritable, enabling naïve migrants to reach remote destinations independently following stepwise (often, nightly) geomagnetic or celestial cues. Which if any such “compass courses” can explain narrow-front trans-continental routes remains unresolved, and evident error-corrections by naïve migrants remain unexplained. We assessed robustness to errors among airborne compass courses and quantified inaugural migration performance globally, accounting for cue transfers (e.g., sun to star compass), in-flight cue maintenance, and previously-overlooked spherical-geometry (longitude) effects. We found (i) sun-compass courses partially self-correct, making them most robust between flight-steps, (ii) within nocturnal flight-steps, geomagnetic or star-compass headings outperform cue-transferred sun-compass steps, (iii) across diverse airborne migration routes, the relative favourability of sun-compass over other courses increases with increasing goal-area, required flight steps and a spherical-geometry factor. Our results can explain enhanced naïve migrant performance, observed diversity in compass-cue hierarchies, and sun-compass orientation being key to many long-distance inaugural migrations.