From: David La Puma <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 01:52
Hey All, We (Mike Lanzone, Andrew Farnsworth and I) are attempting to pull together a nationwide moonwatching event beginning tomorrow night and continuing through next week. We have come up with some protocols, borrowed from the work of many others and modified to suit our needs, and posted them on the following webpage: http://www.woodcreeper.com/moonwatching-2009/ We welcome any and all of you to participate in the event. Prior experience is not required, we only ask that you follow the protocols outlined on the site, and enter and submit the data according to the instructions on the site and within the Excel spreadsheet. Once you read over the materials, if you still have questions, please feel free to email me and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. This is also a great opportunity for folks to get together with other birders (or astronomers!) and coordinate a meet-up. I encourage anyone considering joining the party, to send out an email to their local listserve and see who might be interested in joining you for a night or two of moonwatching. Moonwatching and recording data is always easier when you can switch off with another person. Looking at the weather, on Friday night the Central Flyway should experience the first NW winds which should, in turn, trigger the next migration event. This system will move east over the weekend, setting up migration conditions over the Mississippi and Eastern flyways in successive nights (maybe not until Mon or Tue night for the Eastern Flyway, depending on which forecast model you check). The full moon is on Sunday, October 4th, so moonwatching conditions should be excellent (assuming a clear sky) over the next 8 days. Good Birding AND Moonwatching! Andrew Farnsworth Michael Lanzone David La Puma For a great study using moonwatching, you can read Lowery and Newman's 1966 paper A CONTINENTWIDE VIEW OF BIRD MIGRATION ON FOUR NIGHTS IN OCTOBER published in The Auk, and download-able as a pdf here: http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v083n04/p0547-p0586.pdf ____________________________________________________ David A. La Puma, Ph.D. Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, & Natural Resources Online Teaching Portfolio: http://www.woodcreeper.com/teaching Lockwood lab: http://rci.rutgers.edu/~jlockwoo <http://rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejlockwoo> Websites: http://www.woodcreeper.com http://badbirdz2.wordpress.com Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/woodcreeper ------ End of Forwarded Message -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES Archives: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
