Now Open Access: From migration counts to conservation in a flyway under threat
In the August 2020 issue of British Birds, we published a long-form paper on Batumi Raptor Count. It summarises the 12-year history of BRC, provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season, and outlines some of our education and conservation plans for the future. We are happy to announce this article has now been made available open access, for everyone to read.
Photo by David Erterius.
On top of that, Wim Bovens and Olivier Dochy, have kindly offered to translate the article to Dutch for our audience in Belgium and The Netherlands. This translation was published in Natuur.oriolus and is now available open access too.
Abstract
Since 2008, the Batumi Raptor Count project has monitored the autumn migration of raptors at Batumi, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwest Georgia. What started as an expedition by young birders has become an invaluable project for monitoring raptor populations in the little-studied east African–Palearctic flyway. Autumn raptor migration through the Batumi bottleneck is notable for globally important concentrations of Honey-buzzards Pernis apivorus, Montagu’s Circus pygargus, Pallid C. macrourus and Marsh Harriers C. aeruginosus and accounts for at least 1% of the global breeding population of ten raptor species. By stimulating migration-based ecotourism, the project has had a significant economic impact on the communities where the count stations are located, which has increased societal and political support to reduce the widespread illegal raptor shooting in the region; it has also developed an important educational role for schoolchildren and older students. This paper summarises the 12-year history of the Batumi Raptor Count, and provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season. The project aims to expand its education and conservation remit while continuing to monitor one of the world’s biggest raptor migration bottlenecks.
Download the articles
Article in British Birds
English
Article in Natuur.oriolus
Dutch
New publication in British Birds: From migration counts to conservation in a raptor flyway under threat
Backdrop photo by David Erterius. British Birds cover photo by Bart Hoekstra.
We are proud to announce the current August issue of British Birds contains a long paper on Batumi Raptor Count. It summarises the 12-year history of BRC, provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season, and outlines some of our education and conservation plans for the future.
Abstract
Since 2008, the Batumi Raptor Count project has monitored the autumn migration of raptors at Batumi, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwest Georgia. What started as an expedition by young birders has become an invaluable project for monitoring raptor populations in the little-studied east African– Palearctic flyway. Autumn raptor migration through the Batumi bottleneck is notable for globally important concentrations of Honey-buzzards Pernis apivorus, Montagu’s Circus pygargus, Pallid C. macrourus and Marsh Harriers C. aeruginosus and accounts for at least 1% of the global breeding population of ten raptor species. By stimulating migration-based ecotourism, the project has had a significant economic impact on the communities where the count stations are located, which has increased societal and political support to reduce the widespread illegal raptor shooting in the region; it has also developed an important educational role for school children and older students. This paper summarises the 12-year history of the Batumi Raptor Count, and provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season. The project aims to expand its education and conservation remit while continuing to monitor one of the world’s biggest raptor migration bottlenecks.
New publication: Population trends from 8 years of BRC Autumn Counts
We are proud to announce that counting millions of raptors, over thousands of hours and the help of hundreds of volunteers has now resulted in a new open access publication in Ibis.
Juvenile (left) and adult female (right) Honey Buzzard. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
For 8 important species for the bottleneck, we have analysed trends over the past 8 years of standardised counts (2011-2018). Despite this short study period, we can already detect moderate changes in abundance for at least one age class in all species except Pallid Harrier. You can find the summary of our results through the button below, or read the paper in its entirety in Ibis.
Wouter M.G. Vansteelant, Jasper Wehrmann, Dries Engelen, Johannes Jansen, Brecht Verhelst, Rafa Benjumea, Simon Cavaillès, Triin Kaasiku, Bart Hoekstra & Folkert de Boer. (2019) Accounting for differential migration strategies between age groups to monitor raptor population dynamics in the eastern Black Sea flyway. Ibis.