Every year long-distance migratory birds fly thousands of kilometres, crossing desserts and seas, when flying back and forth between their breeding and wintering areas. But how long does it actually take a migratory bird, maybe weighing about 20 grams, to fly to Africa? How do they schedule their flights? And how high do birds actually fly? And why? Are there physiological, behavioural or environmental limitations to how birds can manage their migrations? During the last decade, tracking studies have yielded new, important knowledge about when and where birds migrate. But previous studies that investigated patterns of bird migration have been limited by loggers that could only collect spatiotemporal data at rather poor resolution (roughly telling us when birds are where). Now, new tracking technology developed at Lund University also allow recording of detailed behaviour of free-flying birds throughout their entire migratory journeys. This means that we now can record not only where birds migrate, but also how they get there. The few studies that have yet employed this technology have open windows towards stunning new insights and seriously challenged previously assumed limits on peak flight altitudes, in-flight changes of altitudes and duration of individual flights, opening the field to a number of new research questions.
For the project you will analyze logger data, including data on activity and altitude. There are also possibilities to join for fieldwork if wanted. We work with several species within this project, so if you think this sounds as an interesting and exciting project, please contact Sissel Sjöberg on sissel.sjoberg@biol.lu.se (or come and see me at the third floor in the Ecology building), and we can discuss more about the potential projects in detail.