Most migratory birds of the world's flyways are in decline, or in conservation troubles by now. The Old World flyway connecting Western Europe with Africa is no exception and hardly a surprise, while Africa features a tragic colonial legacy serving primarily the 'Global North' and a small group of wealthy or royal actors while the vast majority of people in Africa etc are ignored.

Further, this Afro‐Palaearctic flyway is unique in the fact that it features deep science, done for over 100 years, by elite universities, institutions and NGOs. Still, bird numbers in UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Africa overall are in decline already for easily over a decade. It's a crisis of science-based conservation, as practiced by 'The West', in Europe and by Africa and its NGOs and governance.

Here I assess a flyway conservation review by Vickery et al (2023) in the context of science bias, reality context, poverty and some ecological economics perspectives for conservation effectiveness. Reference is made to our own work, e.g. Walther and Huettmann (2021) and Chernetsov and Huettmann (2005), as well as to modern conservation practices, development aid and a future outlook involving climate change, modern methods as well as conflicts and warfare centered around resource extraction at avian conservation hotspots in Africa and the flyway.

Selection of References used (in order of citation)

Vickery, J. A., Mallord, J. W., Adams, W. M., Beresford, A. E., Both, C., Cresswell, W., ... & Hewson, C. M. (2023). The conservation of Afro‐Palaearctic migrants: What we are learning and what we need to know?. Ibis. https://doi.org/10.1111/ibi.13171

Walther, B. A., & Huettmann, F. (2021). Palearctic passerine migrant declines in African wintering grounds in the Anthropocene (1970–1990 and near future): A conservation assessment using publicly available GIS predictors and machine learning. Science of The Total Environment, 777, 146093.

Chernetsov, N., & Huettmann, F. (2005). Linking global climate grid surfaces with local long-term migration monitoring data: spatial computations for the Pied Flycatcher to assess climate-related population dynamics on a continental scale. In International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (pp. 133-142). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Marcacci, G., Briedis, M., Diop, N., Diallo, A. Y., Kebede, F., & Jacot, A. (2023). A roadmap integrating research, policy, and actions to conserve Afro‐Palearctic migratory landbirds at a flyway scale. Conservation Letters, 16(1), e12933.