Documentary on CAnMove research!

Thanks to modern light logger technique it’s now possible to track individual birds during their long migrations. Thus, questions like Where do they go? How fast do they fly? How do they find their way? are likely to soon be answered. For example, earlier this year it was discovered that the great snipe (Gallinago media) can fly to Africa non-stop at an average speed of 80km/h, (see blog entry from May) - a previously unknown strategy in bird migration!
However, despite the technical advances it is still hard work to get results. During 2011, journalist Joakim Lindhé and photographer Per Anders Rudelius followed some CAnMove researchers in their quest to find out more about the enigmas of bird migration. See the documentary on “Vetenskapens värld” tonight 20:00 on SVT2!

Short CAnMove update

Now the international PhD course ”Ecology of Animal migration” is over for the 6^th time and it has been two intensive, but really interesting weeks with intense and stimulating interactions between participants. It has been inspiring to meet all new young scientists and to hear about their contributions to the field of animal movement research. We hope to see as many as possible of you again and we also hope that the students who could not come this year will come next time instead. Thanks to all lecturers and teachers for their enthusiastic participation and support during the course – it is a real pleasure to hear good words from the audience in favor of lecturer’s contributions! Thanks also to Rachel Muheim and Maria Eng Johnsson who organized the course this year!

During the course we also invited course participants, lecturers and employees at Lund University to the music and popular science performance “Music of migration”. The spectacular show and memorable event was performed by ecologist Professor Theunis Piersma, University of Groningen, who talked about the Netherlands extensive agriculture and its effect of wader population dynamics, vulnerability during breeding and migration behavior exemplified by godwits. He also covered effects of land reclaim efforts on stopover sites in the Yellow Sea area putting migrating red knot at risk in China. The very skilled Dutch musician (and artist) Sytze Pruiksma added films, photographs and music to the cross-disciplinary show and the improvised excitement by this classically trained percussionist underlined the importance and urgency in the messages sent to the audience. Together they enthralled the audience for almost 1,5 hour. From the audience: “A true highlight event of the year!” 

New members of the CAnMove principal investigator team have been invited and have resulted in an increase from 14 to 16 people. The two new PIs are Rachel Muheim, Functional Ecology and Christoffer Johansson, Evolutionary Ecology at the Department of Biology. We are happy that the two young and very successful scientists accepted our invitation to be more actively associated with the program and we hope they will enjoy the work with CAnMove. 

Rachel Muheim was one of the scientists within CAnMove that this year received funding from VR (Vetenskapsrådet) for scientists in the beginning of their career and with this money she will continue her work studying the magnetic compass in birds that migrate. Congratulaions and good luck!

// Susanne