Cueing on distant conditions before migrating does not prevent false starts: a case study with African elephants.

Migratory animals often use environmental cues to time their seasonal migrations. Local conditions may, however, differ from distant ones, and current conditions may poorly predict future conditions. This may be particularly true for early wet season conditions in tropical systems, as storms and associated rainfall events are generally not predictable at the scale of weeks or days and are heterogeneously distributed even at the scale of a few kilometres.