Teaching teachers in Georgia about birds
In 2019 BRC started an educational project involving schools, teachers and Georgian conservationists, with the support of British Birds Charitable Trust (BBCT) and IJsvogelfonds of Birdlife the Netherlands. The aim of the project was to bring birds into Georgian schools as a teaching tool, empowering teachers more in the educational process than in content development. The project mostly reaches the villages which are close to the count stations. In September 2019 we organised the first two workshops with the teachers of the schools involved.
The project unfortunately had to stop due to COVID, but this actually led us to work on the edition of an educational booklet in kartuli for teachers and educators. This resulted in a beautiful work of art, with many illustrations. The 60-page book is ready to print now and will show educators how to teach students about birds, their biology, ecology, migration and conservation. At the end of the book there are 6 proposals for activities to do throughout the year. Teachers can choose to adapt these activities to their groups to explore nature through birds. This new material has been developed together with the Georgian teachers and considered all the material already created beforehand in the country. We hope it will be a very useful tool for educational centres throughout Georgia.
During the next season we will also develop a calendar with bird-related activities. After the teachers and their students have worked with the book for a while, we want to organise field trips for the schools already next year.
Drawings were made by Elien Hoekstra and Rafa Benjumea and many thanks to our Elza Makaradze, Aslan Bolkvadze and Dachi Shoshitashvili
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.
Fundraiser for 2023
Keep the Batumi Raptor Count flying high with your support
For thirteen years the BRC has conducted high quality raptor migration counts. This long-term monitoring is critical to understand how bird populations are doing in our rapidly changing world. However, structural funding for monitoring schemes such as ours is very hard, if not impossible, to find. Over the years we’ve been able to run our counts thanks to the support from loyal sponsors like OSME and Swarovski Optik, T-shirt sales, donations from ecotourism operators and members of the public, and last but not least: thousands of hours of unpaid work by over 400 volunteers from dozens of countries. This has enabled us to do monitoring work of extraordinary quality, delivering unique data to detect trends in the abundance, demography and migration timing of otherwise poorly known raptor populations. Furthermore, we’ve always tried to be as open and transparent as possible by having open data sharing procedures. This sets us apart from many bird observatories worldwide.
Last year, for the first time in BRC history, we started a big crowdfunding campaign to raise the budget needed to run this year’s count. The response from the birdwatching community to our campaign was immense and its success exceeded all of our expectations! We are very grateful to all of you who decided to support us. Thanks to your generosity, we already have a decent budget of at least 6000 EUR in our wallet for the autumn count of 2023. Nonetheless, this is not enough to run another full season count. For this reason we are picking up crowdfunding again.
Help us raise funds for the 2023 count
Securing the count comes with the same deal as before: we need 20.000 EUR to run our 2023 autumn count. Our aim is to raise this amount before the end of October when the current autumn count finishes. Given our large international base of supporters and followers, the many visitors we hope to see in Batumi this autumn, and the generosity of the birdwatching and nature conservation community, we believe it should be possible!
On the crowdfunding page you can find more details on how your money will be put to use. To already give some examples: on average, 200 EUR funds one day of counting. With 130 EUR you fund a one-week participation of a young Georgian conservationist. So what are you waiting for? Please, help us circulate this message widely by sharing this message with all your friends and family! The sooner we get our budgets together, the better our team can focus on organising next year’s count. Instead of spending days behind our computer wasting time competing with other conservation groups for small grants, we can put all our efforts in producing important research and organising valuable education and conservation work in parallel to the counts. Your donation makes a massive difference to us, and you know we’ll use it wisely!