Migrating birds do not always travel along the shortest possible routes between breeding and wintering sites. Rather, detours are a common phenomenon in response to availability of foraging habitats, generic wind patterns, predation risk, and ecological barriers. The Himalayas are a formidable ecological barrier within the Central Asian Flyway (CAF), but hitherto research has focused on highaltitude flights of species that cross the Himalayas, and thus information on species that circumvent this mountain range is lacking in this understudied migration system.