Shanti Davis, Mark Maftei, Mark Mallory, Isabeau Pratte, Birgit Braune, Carina Gjerdrum, and Sarah Wong will be heading to Cape Town, South Africa to present exciting research on marine birds. The World Seabird Conference is held every four years, and it's.....kind of a big deal. The theme this year is "Seabirds: Global Ocean Sentinels", and much of the work we have been involved with over the last few years highlights exactly this idea; that seabirds are valuable and informative indicators of ocean health.
Talks and posters will feature a variety of exciting new research on a whole mess of awesome birds.....but perhaps none more appropriate than Shanti's tracking study of Sabine's gulls which demonstrates that some of these birds migrate from their breeding grounds in the Canadian High Arctic all the way to South Africa for the winter. 36 hours on a plane hardly sounds fun, but if a 200 gram bird can do it, so can we :)