Przemysław Busse
Bird Migration Research Station, University of Gdańsk,
Przebendowo, 84-210 Choczewo, Poland
busse@univ.gda.pl
Theoretically, the SEEN basics should be known to all participants of the
network and rather it is not necessary to convince someone to work together
that allows improving our possibilities to study bird migration as a whole and at
our own area. However, all the time new members join the network and parallel
there is a continuous process of improvement of certain methods, new
observations are done and new ideas are born. So, from time to time refreshing
of our memories and pointing at some basic ideas could be reasonable.
The first is to understand why the bird migration is so complicated and
difficult to study and why to solve the problems we must work at large territorial
scale and use standardized data collection and storing. The most fundamental
thing in the data collection is knowledge about seasonal migration dynamics that
is interesting even alone, but it is a basis for any further studies - large scale
migration patterns, stop-over strategies, biometrical analyses and orientation
behaviour. The orientation studies became to be one of the most important tools
in understanding bird migration patterns so, as this is a relatively new method in
our work, it will be discussed in more detail and with some examples of results
obtained. Other new field of interest is analysis of the birds? stop-over strategy
at migration different stages - this is possible only by using extensive data
collected in many places.
This is typical network study and it will be briefly shown as a "History of
one journey" story. Finally, in a little bit "not-so-formal form", there will be a
new suggestion that could be taken under consideration when comparing results
from different stations of our network - how birds, and birders, behave in new
situations, outside of personal experience and in biotopes strange to them.




