A huge congratulations today goes out to Love Lab Mitacs post-doctoral fellow Dr. Emily McKinnon for publishing a groundbreaking paper with Bird Studies Canada co-supervisor Dr. Christina Artuso on the previously unknown migration of the elusive Connecticut warbler in the journal Ecology. Entitled “The mystery of the missing warbler” Emily’s work used micro-geolocator technology to track the Fall migration of a warbler species for which, even to this day, we had almost no life-history information on to begin with. Emily found clear evidence that Connecticut Warblers migrate over the Atlantic Ocean in fall by using a minimum 48-hr non-stop flight from the eastern coast of the US to landing points on Cuba or Hispaniola, a distance of 1700-2400km. She also found the surprising result that, after a stopover of 5-7 days, Connecticut Warblers again traveled over open water (the Caribbean Sea) in a single flight covering 600-800km before travelling to their final winter sites in the Amazon basin. Along with recent data on Blackpoll warblers, this is the first direct evidence of any other songbird species using an open-ocean strategy to reach winter sites in South America. Of course, solving one mystery with respect to fall migration routes of this species has opened up perhaps an even more pressing issue: exploring their non-breeding habitat usage to ensure the conservation of this little-known warbler before it disappears altogether. Fantastic work Emily.