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.