Sorry for taking so long for closure, but it’s been a whirlwind of activity over the last two months! On October 1st Inga gave birth to our daughter, Corinna Wren La Puma, and we’ve been busy learning how to be parents ever since.

Following that, the next biggest event was the presidential election, which (if you’ve been reading this blog at all over the last year) made me extremely excited. I’ll save my politics for an upcoming post.

As for migration, as it does every year, it continues to occur in one form or another even after the big nocturnal flights of songbirds have dwindled. I’m currently focusing on finishing my dissertation by this summer so that I can pursue a postdoc on the topic of migration. This study really deserves to be taken to another level in terms of scientific rigor. I think the last four years has proven that the infrastructure exists to have consistent feedback from the birding community, which is a very important component to ground-truthing any predictions I might make. The next step will be to make those prediction more quantitative, basing them on maasurable weather and environmental variables and quantifying the numbers of birds moving over an area. My plan now is to develop a postdoctoral research project to do just that, so if anyone out there is interested in taking on a postdoc, please let me know. 🙂

For all of you who participated by providing field observations, thanks so much for all of your help. For those of you who contributed to the site financially, I cannot thank you enough. I just received the bill for this coming year’s hosting fees, and was able to pay it off because of you. Thanks again.

While I will be focusing primarily on completing my dissertation over the coming months, I will make every effort to summarize the data we have collected on this site. If you are doing research on migration and would like any of the data collected here, email me and I will provide whatever I have.

In the meantime, I wish you well, and hope you will continue to visit the site and participate in whatever discourse should arise.

Kindest Regards,

David