The Guardian: Covid limits migration despite more people displaced by war and disasters. “The coronavirus pandemic had a radical effect on migration, limiting movement despite increasing levels of internal displacement from conflict and climate disasters, the UN’s International Organization for Migration said in a report on Wednesday.”
Audubon: How Birders Are Boosting Their Yard Lists While They Sleep. “Nocturnal flight call (NFC) recording is a different kind of birding. It doesn’t require binoculars or even stepping foot outside. Instead, a microphone placed on a roof or wedged into an apartment window allows birders to eavesdrop on migrating birds overhead. On calm, quiet nights, inexpensive microphones are able to record birds calling hundreds of feet in the sky—far beyond the reach of our hearing—and cache their calls on a recording device for later review and identification.”
EurekAlert: International team partners with UN to launch global initiative to map ungulate migrations. “An international team of 92 scientists and conservationists has joined forces to create the first-ever global atlas of ungulate (hooved mammal) migrations, working in partnership with the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), a UN treaty. The detailed maps of the seasonal movements of herds worldwide will help governments, indigenous people and local communities, planners and wildlife managers identify current and future threats to migrations, and advance conservation measures to sustain them in the face of an expanding human footprint.”
Phys .org: New digital media keeps families connected through forced migration. “Every morning in Vienna, 24-year-old Rasheed receives a WhatsApp message from his mother, who currently lives in Lebanon. Since he arrived in Austria in 2015 after fleeing from Syria, his mother has been choosing a picture with flowers, added a few words and sent it to Rasheed and to his siblings in their chat group. His brother lives in Dubai, the two sisters are at present in Turkey. One of them wants to get married soon, the other one had a baby three months ago. All four siblings respond, and this is how these five members of one family start their day. Even if the names and places in this example are made up, the scenario is real and typical of refugees in Austria.”
MIT News: Historic migration patterns are written in Americans’ DNA. “Studies of DNA from ancient human fossils have helped scientists to trace human migration routes around the world thousands of years ago. But can modern DNA tell us anything about more recent movements, especially in an ancestrally diverse melting pot like the United States? To find out, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analyzed data provided by more than 32,000 Americans as part of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project.”
Phys .org: Roaming Russian eagles leave scientists broke. “Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles were forced to start a crowdfunding campaign after their birds wandered into Iran and foreign text messages from their tracking devices depleted the project’s budget.”
The Irish News: Citizen scientists track humpback whale travels with help of social media . “Humpback whales are known to make vast migrations between their breeding and feeding grounds, and are increasingly being seen in UK seas. Now the first ever confirmed record of a UK-sighted whale hundreds of miles away in its summer feeding grounds in the high Arctic has been revealed, after its picture was spotted on Facebook by volunteer ‘citizen scientists’.”
The Independent: Social media helps prove UK animals are migrating north as climate warms. “Dozens of animals, from birds to bats, are moving north across the UK as a result of climate change, scientists have discovered thanks to the help of social media.”
Tennessee Secretary of State: State Library & Archives Launches New Digital Project on Revolutionary War. “As our nation prepares to celebrate Independence Day, the Tennessee State Library & Archives has launched Patriot Paths, a new project that uses Revolutionary War pension records to map the paths that these soldiers took before and after their service. The project, which is still in progress, was unveiled by State Librarian and Archivist Chuck Sherrill at the National Genealogical Society’s recent annual convention.”
GhanaWeb: Manual, Database and Mobile Application on migration unveiled. “The Media Response, a Non-Governmental Organisation has concurrently launched a training manual for journalists, database and mobile application on migration to enhance accurate and up-to-speed information dissemination on free movement of persons.”
Newswise: UF/IFAS Launches Gulf Marine Animal Tracking Website. “Animal migrations are some of the most dramatic natural events on the planet, from wildebeest on the Serengeti to monarch butterflies traveling to Mexico. In fish, an iconic example of migration is salmon returning to their birth sites in huge numbers to spawn before they die. However, there are still many unknowns in marine animal movement patterns, as their travel occurs underwater and often far offshore. Scientists at the University of Florida are changing this through a collaborative movement ecology research program that started in 2014. It’s called Integrated Tracking of Aquatic Animals in the Gulf of Mexico (iTAG).”
State Library of Western Australia: State Library’s oral histories recognised by UNESCO. “The State Library of Western Australia’s Migration Voices collection of oral histories will be recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under its Australian Memory of the World Program (AMW). The program is aimed at identifying and safeguarding significant documentary heritage materials of national significance to Australia.”
Care2: Protecting Migratory Land Animals is More Complicated Than We Thought. “Some species inherently know when and where to migrate, but a new study has offered a more complicated perspective for land animals by providing the first solid evidence that they need to learn about seasonal migrations from each other…. This study is part of a growing body of migration discoveries coming out of Wyoming, a lot of which will be put together in ‘Wild Migrations: Atlas of Wyoming’s Ungulates,’ due out this October, which details all of the state’s ungulate migrations, in addition to an online database that makes migration data widely available to interested stakeholders.”
Wired: ‘ICE Is Everywhere’: Using Library Science To Map The Separation Crisis. “Since May, the US government had taken more than 2,300 kids away from their families as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ new ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy, which calls for criminally prosecuting all people entering the country illegally…. Between the ad-hoc implementation of ‘zero tolerance’ and the opaque bureaucracy of the immigration system in general, migrant advocates, journalists, and even politicians struggled to find clear answers. [Alex] Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil’s job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before.”
