The shortest possible migratory route for birds is not always the best route to travel. Substantial research effort has established that birds in captivity are capable of orienting toward the direction of an intended goal, but efforts to examine how free-living birds use navigational information under conditions that potentially make direct flight toward that goal inefficient have been limited in spatiotemporal scales and in the number of individuals observed because of logistical and technological limitations. Using novel and recently developed techniques for analysis of Doppler polarimetric weather surveillance radar data, I examine in-flight behaviors employed by migratory birds as they transition to and from their wintering and breeding grounds. I explore regional, seasonal, altitudinal, and latitudinal dependencies on how migrants utilize and cope with winds aloft.