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.
Update: Moult study of Batumi raptors
The Batumi Raptor Count has done extraordinary raptor migration monitoring for years, but apart from all the migration data we have been collecting for so long, the bottleneck offers another interesting possibility. With the help of our volunteers with photography equipment, we are able to study the moult of the Batumi raptors.
Moult is a broad field of study which is often neglected due to logistical challenges. Moult studies require comprehensive data that is generally obtained via access to large numbers of captured birds or museum skins to gain detailed information. This is particularly difficult for birds of prey. Moult studies can give insights into difficult to study aspects of bird ecology via interactions with other life events. These studies are therefore an important application in conservation driven research. Both migration and breeding of raptors (or birds in general) have been studied extensively, but moult is a broad field where fundamental insights can still be made. To the best of our knowledge only one study has used digital photography to study moult patterns of migrant raptors at a geographical bottleneck, revealing a strong positive effect of autumn passage date on moult progression of Marsh Harriers migrating through Italy (Strait of Messina). Adult female marsh harriers showed a more extended moult and later timing of migration than adult males (Ramírez & Panuccio, 2019).
Honey buzzards, adult male and female. Both birds have moulted their P1 and P2, the female has a growing P3 on the right wing and replaced 3 innermost tail feathers. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
As you know, the Batumi bottleneck offers access to a great number of birds that can be photographed up close, and there are always generous counters (or tourists) who are willing to share their raptor photos with us.
And that is exactly what we have been doing. Since the 2019 autumn count we have systematically collected all the photographs from counters who were willing to share them for research purposes. This means that we have several hundreds of GB’s of photos available for a moult study and we have already started collecting moult data from the photos. Collecting enough data and analysing this takes a lot of time and effort, but we hope to be able to publish our first results in 2022.
Montagu’s harrier, immature male. Primaries 1-7 are new as well as secondaries S1 and S5. Photo by David Erterius.
The aim of this study is to use digital photography at a globally important raptor migration bottleneck to quantify moult progression in a wide range of migrant raptors, and to test the association of moult strategies with species-specific traits (evolutionary lineage, migratory traits) and individual traits such as age, sex and timing of passage within species. Expected outcomes of this study are variation within genera (in relation with individual traits). Some examples: species that migrate later have more advanced moult than others. Individual traits can show us that females have moulted more feathers than males, immature birds also show more moulted feathers than adults. Furthermore short-distance migrants have more moulted feathers than long-distance migrants and partial migrants show more variation in their moult extent.
We will continue collecting photos from our counters in the upcoming seasons, so we can continue to build towards a large dataset for moult study.
New publication: Opportunistic in-flight foraging behaviour of Black Kites during spring migration
The most recent autumn issue of the Sandgrouse, published by OSME, contains a short paper describing preliminary results of Black Kites obtained during the two BRC spring counts conducted so far. The results of the spring count show interesting in-flight foraging behaviour of Black Kites and describe their more numerous occurrence in spring compared to autumn. The paper is now available open access!
Black Kite with an interesting prey: a mole! Photo by Tohar Tal.
Abstract
In 2019 and 2020 the Batumi Raptor Count conducted two small-scale pilot counts to assess the importance of the flyway in spring. We present preliminary results for Black Kite Milvus migrans, showing that this species is more numerous in spring than in autumn and that it engages in in-flight foraging while passing through the Batumi bottleneck, a behaviour that has never been observed in twelve years of autumn counts. In-flight foraging appears to be largely opportunistic, occurring during only a short period of the Black Kite migration season and involving a minority of individuals. As such, in-flight foraging opportunities are unlikely to be the main cause of the greater spring aggregation of Black Kites in the eastern Black Sea flyway.
This year the third and final spring count will be conducted from the start of March till the end of May. Are you interested in participating? Don’t hesitate and send an email to spring@batumiraptorcount.org.