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1. Animal migration has long intrigued scientists and wildlife managers alike, yet migratory species face increasing challenges because of habitat fragmentation, climate change and over‐exploitation. Central to the understanding migratory species is the objective discrimination between migratory and nonmigratory individuals in a given population, quantifying the timing, duration and distance of migration and the ability to predict migratory movements.

2. Here, we propose a uniform statistical framework to (i) separate migration from other movement behaviours, (ii) quantify migration parameters without the need for arbitrary cut‐off criteria and (iii) test predictability across individuals, time and space.

3. We first validated our novel approach by simulating data based on established theoretical movement patterns. We then formulated the expected shapes of squared displacement patterns as nonlinear models for a …