Migrations was commissioned by the Musings Ensemble for cellist Jamie McLaren on the occasion of his being awarded a PhD in Ornithology from University of Amsterdam in 2015, and is based on a poem of the same name by Eleonore Sch?nmeier. The birds depicted in this piece - lesser black-backed gulls, Sardinian warblers, Northern wheatears, and willow warblers - are all birds that might be found on the southern Spanish coast, where the poem takes place.