Many sensor network applications feature bursty traffic patterns: after long periods of idle time with almost no network traffic, large amounts of data have to be transmitted reliably and in a timely manner. One example is volcano monitoring \cite{volcano}, where precious high-volume data is generated by rare volcanic eruptions. Unfortunately, existing MAC protocols do not sufficiently support such applications with bursty traffic patterns. CSMA protocols such as WiseMAC or SCP-MAP have very low overhead in idle situations, but have high overhead and low throughput caused by collisions under high load. In contrast, TDMA protocols such as LMAC can handle high loads without collision, but have low throughput and significant overhead in idle mode BurstMAC closes this gap by combining low idle overhead with high throughput under load, while still offering connectivity to all neighboring nodes. We present the ideas behind BurstMAC and report initial performance results.