From Georgia to Tanzania: the secret ways of the Levant Sparrowhawk
by Dries Engelen & Triin Kaasiku
Levant Sparrowhawk ‘Dudu’ shortly after being released with a GPS/GSM transmitter. Photo by Pelle Mellov.
Young falconers ringing Eurasian Sparrowhawks. Photo by Gizo Seskuria.
After 3 months of flying from woodland to woodland, often following river valleys and making longer stops on the way, ‘our’ Levant Sparrowhawk ‘Dudu’ is now sending data from the savannahs of Tanzania! This is the second time a Levant Sparrowhawk’s migration has been followed to Tanzania, a previously unknown wintering site for the species. All in all, a fantastic result for the work that BRC has carried out with the young falconers and Fauna & Flora International over the last 5 years.
After introducing the young falconers to raptor ringing in 2021, we were thrilled to successfully apply for the William A. Burnham Memorial Fund of the Peregrine Fund at the beginning of this year which allowed us to get some tags and take things to the next level. Our search for lightweight GPS/GSM transmitters brought us to Hunan Global Messenger Ltd, who were excited about our project and decided to sponsor us with some extra tags still! After all these years of talking about it, and laying out the ground work with the help of the WWF INNO-fonds, we were finally going to Georgia to bring together traditional falconry practises with modern tracking technology to further study the migration of the Levant Sparrowhawk. With experienced tagger Pelle Mellov joining the BRC and FFI field team nothing could go wrong anymore, right!? Well…
Upon arriving by the end of August, count coordinators told us that most raptor species seemed to be delayed this year. Even after 14 years of counting, we learned that migration timings are not as fixed as we have believed them to be. On top of being late, weather conditions were such that birds migrated high through the blue skies, far out of reach for our young falconers to lure them down into their nets. We tried everything, while moving between our host families in Poti and Sakhalvasho, to try and find the best trapping locations in these sub-optimal conditions. We even set up a few mist nets in parallel to the trapping efforts of the young falconers, all of it to increase the chances of catching a Levant.
Young falconer waiting for Levant Sparrowhawks to arrive. Photo by Dries Engelen.
Deploying the tag on Levant Sparrowhawk ‘Dudu’. Photo by Gizo Seskuria.
Then finally, in the afternoon of the 1st of September our waiting paid off! We deployed our first tag (4.5 g) on a juvenile bird, and nicknamed it ‘Gizo’. The excitement gave the entire team a boost, providing all of us with energy needed to spend another two weeks hoping for trapping conditions to improve… Another 10 days passed before we finally caught a second bird, on September 11th. Again a juvenile, this time nicknamed ‘Dudu’, after one of our team members who ended up fighting (and overcoming) a sudden serious illness. We kept on trying for some more, but unfortunately the weather was just not on our side this year, and as the days passed, so did the Levants… high up in the skies, or further east over the mountains… until eventually Levant Sparrowhawks got replaced by Eurasian Sparrowhawks and our chances of trapping more individuals were over…
We returned home with mixed feelings, still having 6 tags left, and not getting regular updates from Gizo anymore either. Thankfully Dudu was still sending us data, allowing us to track its journey into Africa, until by mid-October Dudu too, stopped communicating. Two months passed, and we had pretty much lost hope, until suddenly, out of the blue, Dudu sent its greetings from Tanzania! Apparently, it spent a month in South Sudan, out of reach of GSM coverage, after which it continued south passing Lake Victoria and arriving to the plains of Tanzania. The tag is still in great condition and Dudu is communicating with us again on daily basis.
This was such a rewarding result that any doubts we had about continuing this work next year, were instantly replaced with enthusiasm and motivation to return to Georgia once more and deploy the six remaining tags, nicely coinciding with the 15th birthday of BRC.
Watch Now: Worlds Collide
The short film Worlds Collide, directed by Nicholas Rodd, about migration through the Georgian bottleneck is now free to watch indefinitely and embedded below.
“Across the eastern coast of the Black Sea, through the foothills of the Southern Caucasus Mountains one of the world’s greatest natural spectacles takes place. Over a million birds of prey pass through a narrow bottleneck in Georgia. Below them, scientists and birders eagerly watch and record the skies whilst at the same time local traditions send showers of bullets and nets snapping in their direction.
A clash of ideals and beliefs, this film will take you into the heart of an evolving story. A story which explores a clash of western ideals with local customs, a shared love and excitement for the magic that is migration, a world apart in how they enjoy the spectacle. A conflict waiting to happen or an opportunity to show a new way in which conservationists can work together with local communities to avoid a deep and bitter battle, safeguarding the future of migration in Georgia.”
For OSME (the Ornithological Society for the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia), Nicholas wrote a guest blog about the project.
Falconers: friends or foes in raptor research and conservation?
Over the years Batumi Raptor Count has been able to piece together an accurate picture of the causes and consequences of raptor shooting in Georgia: a widespread but illegal practice that poses a clear and urgent threat to numerous species. The impact and drivers of traditional falconers, however, have long remained a bit of a blind spot in our work. To help change this, and to investigate whether a constructive alliance can be forged with ethical falconers, long-time BRC team members Dries Engelen and Wouter Vansteelant teamed up with Gizo Seskuria and Nika Budagashvili of the Georgian branch of Fauna & Flora International last autumn.
An elder falconer from the Gonio area in conversation with Dries, Wouter and Gizo. Sept 2021
A young falconer from Poti ringing his first Eurasian Sparrowhawk. Sept 2021
Supported by an INNO-fund of WWF Netherlands, our team spent about three weeks visiting several known falconry hot-spots across western Georgia, from Gonio to Poti and Bandza. We conducted informal, but in-depth interviews with 20 falconers about their motivations and practises, thereby scouting for particularly conservation-minded individuals with whom we could potentially start research collaborations. Our hope was to find around 5 motivated individuals to be trained in raptor ringing, as a first step towards a more ambitious project in which we want to trap and tag Sparrowhawks with GPS-transmitters. By involving falconers in research through ringing, and by using state-of-the-art tracking technology, we hope to increase their awareness and appreciation of the raptor species in their nets, and eventually become conservation allies in the fight against illegal hunting.
Despite a relatively short period, the project yielded a lot of new insights into the current state of Georgian falconry and its developments over the last 25 years. While most falconers find it important to keep the tradition alive and enjoy the thrill of trapping, training the hawks and competing with friends, very few still use their hawks to hunt quail. There are also concerning reports of increasing illegal traffic in hawks and large falcons (Peregrine, Saker) from Georgia to Turkey and the Arabian peninsula. At the same time, we strengthened our relationship with two young falconers who participated in BRC and FFI projects before and who have recently started university studies in ecology (Giorgi and Ioane). We also teamed up with their master-falconer, Levan Duduchava, who was by far the most frank and open falconer we have met on our trip, and someone with an incredible species knowledge.
Ringing hawks turned out to be more challenging, as the weather conditions were often against us. Nevertheless, over a total of 9 days we managed to trap, ring and measure 6 male and 49 female Eurasian Sparrowhawks and 2 Levant Sparrowhawks. This already provides interesting patterns in body measurements, such as a tendency for adults to have higher and less variable weights than juveniles. One young female that was ringed just before being released after her 2nd day in captivity turned out to have probably lost a huge amount of weight, raising concerns about whether such birds are in fact able to survive upon release.
Over the coming months we will be writing up our findings and perspectives on the current state of migration-based falconry in Georgia, and we’ll also be applying for small grants to fund GPS-trackers for Sparrowhawk research in autumn 2022. Whether and how this can all lead to a larger or longer-term alliance with falconers is still a large open question. The only certainty we have is that doing nothing will change nothing. So we are keeping an open but critical mind. At the very least we hope to further support Ioane and Giorgi in their formation as young ecologists, and to become enthusiastic ambassadors for raptor research and conservation in Georgia.