Autumn Report 2019 published
Adult male dark morph Marsh Harrier. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
The 12th season brought unprecedented numbers of Black Kites, a new raptor species for the BRC counts, and marked the start of an education project in collaboration with local teachers. You can read about that, and a LOT more, in the extensive report of the last season. Make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom for the behind-the-scenes gallery.
Have fun reading!
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.
Autumn Report 2018 published
Juvenile Imperial Eagle. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
The freshly published BRC Autumn Report 2018 features season highlights, phenological peculiarities and general overview with many photos of both birds and people. Make sure to scroll down to the very end for the behind-the-scenes gallery!
We hope this reading brings back warm memories and evokes thoughts of joining us next year.