About lunaves

Welcome to lunaves.org!  lunaves is a non-profit initiative by a group of bird watching enthusiasts on nocturnal bird migration.

Migration is a widely studied phenomenon. From the aggregation of sightings by enthusiast birdwatchers all around the world to the tracking of bird banding recoveries, today there are vast databases of information that are publicly accessible. Yet, the passage of birds itself remains elusive. Billions of passerines and near-passerines migrate during the night under the cover of darkness, making migration study a bit like the infamous Higgs’s boson- one can only imagine what it is like through the effects it leaves behind. In the case of the smaller birds we can only ‘sense’ migration through unexpected bird falls; or through bird banding of migrants that stop to rest or just when we see no more birds in the morning because everything has moved on.

lunaves.org is an initiative with the aim of exploring this new dimension of bird migration. Current nocturnal migration studies  involving radar and thermal technology are sporadic and local, generally limited to research institutes that use specialised equipment. We want to find ways how any birdwatcher can be a part of this phenomenon.

As a start, we want to focus on the most simple and basic of all nocturnal bird watching activities – moon-watching.  For those of you who are familiar with this technique, we all agree that the romance fades away after a few hours of staring at the moon – so we are currently exploring ways this can be facilitated through the use of autonomous devices. This presentation we gave a while back describes the initiative in more detail.

We are really looking forward to get started on this journey and we hope you join us. Let us know what you think and drop us an email at the contact us form.