By Sachin Anand, a PhD student at the Université du Québec à Rimouski

Thanks to an excellence scholarship from QCBS, I attended the European Ornithologists’ Union (EOU) conference for the second time in my career. 

The EOU was first set up in the year 1997 with the goal of advancing ornithological research within Europe. The conferences are now held every two years at different locations across Europe and have become an international event. This year’s conference was held at my alma mater, Lund University in Sweden, between the 21st and 25th of August. I still have ongoing research collaborations with my former group, and the conference presented an amazing opportunity to meet with my former colleagues and friends. I loved living in Lund, which has around 100,000 inhabitants, of which 46,000 are students from the university, making Lund the perfect university town. Lund University is ranked 3rd in the world for ornithology (CWUR ranking) and is therefore an ideal location for an ornithology conference. The conference had around 460 participants and at any point during the conference, there were five parallel oral presentation sessions and two plenary talks every day along with poster sessions. This is just an example to show the scale of this conference.

For my oral session, I presented my experiment on the relationship between heat and cold tolerance of snow buntings conducted last winter. Considering the vast number of people who attended my talk, I can safely conclude that the snow bunting is a well-known and loved bird among ornithologists. Throughout the conference, I engaged with several researchers working in physiology who provided me valuable insights to my research work. In particular, I had detailed conversations with Prof. Andreas Nord, who is an expert in avian ecophysiology about my project and possible future studies. 

The conference ended with a fancy dinner and a musical performance. This informal setting set the stage for networking and exploring future collaborations. Before my flight back home, I paid quick visits to the Tropikariet (an indoor zoo at Helsingborg, Sweden) and the National Aquarium in Copenhagen, Denmark. In conclusion, the EOU conference became my first international conference of my doctoral study and an excellent start in sharing my research with the larger scientific community.

About the author:

Sachin Anand is a doctoral student at the University of Quebec at Rimouski. “I am studying the effects of rising Arctic temperatures on the Snow Bunting, a small migratory bird adapted to life in the cold. My studies are supervised by Prof. François Vézina at the University of Quebec at Rimouski and Prof. Oliver Love at the University of Windsor.”

Please check out the official pictures from the conference here: https://www.eou2023.event.lu.se/eou-2023-photos

For more information on EOU: https://eounion.org/