By Samuel Temidayo Osinubi, FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology
Migration strategies within the tropics are still poorly understood as are the drivers of movement and the degree of connectivity between sites in migrant birds that have their global range and life cycle exclusively on a single continent – intra-continental migrants. On this side of the Atlantic, the plan is to establish an intra-African bird migration project.
The MLSG organised a two-day satellite symposium just before the official EOU conference earlier this year in August. We had about 70 official attendees with another 20 or so dropping in informally, particularly on the day the EOU official started. Thirty nine attendees gave presentations – short summaries of these are given below. A visual impression can be found here, more info in text below.
By Sam Ivande, APLORI, Jos, Nigeria
I received an invitation in February 2017 by the organisers of the MLSG symposium in Turku, Finland to be one of the plenary speakers at the symposium in August 2017. Through combined funding provided by the MLSG, BirdLife Netherlands and the A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (APLORI), I was able to attend the symposium and the EOU conference afterwards. Although the initial title for my invited talk was on “Coordinating bird research on a national and regional scale: a West African perspective”, I thought it would be important to put this within the context of the still obvious need to develop ornithological capacity within the region.