Successful completion of 2023 Crowdfunding!
Less than three months ago, on Christmas Eve 2022, we re-launched our crowdfunding campaign to fund the upcoming autumn count of 2023. While we already started raising awareness during the past 2022 autumn count, we had raised just about 5000EUR of our 20.000EUR target. Since we had little other funding options left, we knew we had to continue with the crowdfunding to raise the amount needed to continue our monitoring work in the Batumi bottleneck. Now, we are very happy and proud to say that we raised over 20.000EUR in the past months!
While we already successfully ran our crowdfunding campaign last year, the BRC team was nonetheless hugely excited, and perhaps slightly nervous to relive the rollercoaster of going through another crowdfunding campaigning this year again. After the 2022 autumn count, we were a mere few thousand euro away from the 10.000EUR mark. And right after re-launching our campaign during Christmas, the donations started coming in and soon after we hit the 10K mark! While trying to keep the attention through social media and our newsletter, the rate of donations slowed down quite a bit. It wasn’t until the first of March when our counter hit the 14K bar. This was the moment to reveal our cards…
Similarly to last year, our long-time friends at OSME kindly offered to help us reach our target by matching up to 3K in donations! We planned the donation matching campaign to start on the 1st of March and finish on the 14th. And with the 14K on the counter, we knew that in theory we’d only needed 3K more in donations to, in combination with the matching campaign, reach our goal! But little did we know that the matching campaign sparked a huge boost under our supporters and the birdwatching community. In less than two weeks we received over 6000EUR in donations! And on top of this we would receive the 3K in donation matching by OSME!
Of these donations, we received over 1000EU of donations that had arrived to our project account at Natuurpunt, which facilitates tax-deductible donations for our Belgian supporters. Additionally, our friends at NatureWalks organised a raptor identification course and they donated no less than 620EUR to our project!
Combined, we raised 28.471 EUR during the past few months! This means, once again, we overshot our crowdfunding target, leaving plenty to fund the 2023 autumn count, and nearly half of the budget we’ll need for the autumn count of 2024! The enthusiastic response to our crowdfunding campaign has made us feel hugely supported by the international birdwatching community, and we hope we will be able to rely on that support in years to come. After all, and despite ongoing efforts to secure more structural funding, our monitoring work will continue to depend on your generous support for the foreseeable future.
That said, thanks to your support the immediate future looks bright, and we are excited we’ll be able to organise another outstanding count with many old-time friends and new volunteers next autumn. Didi madloba!
P.S. Our call for count coordinators for Autumn 2023 is opened, and the call for counters will open on April 15th!
Count Coordinators for Autumn 2023
We are still raising funds, but preparations for the BRC Autumn Count of 2023 have started. The count will run from the 12th of August until the 21st of October. We are searching for brave count coordinators to lead the team of raptor counters in one of the most magnificent bottlenecks in the world.
If you are interested in the position, please continue reading for more information and submit your application by the 31st of March.
PS. Applications to volunteer counter positions will be opened on April 15th.
From counts to knowledge: research in progress at BRC
While Batumi Raptor Count has hosted student internships and dissertations for many years, our popularity among students of bird migration rose substantially in recent years, to the point that our Research Coordinator has been struggling to accommodate all requests. Strap in for a overview of what research is being conducted at BRC right now.
Comparing relative timing of different species of raptors between the Pyrenees (red) and the Caucasus (blue)
First and foremost, after the successful completion of our last spring count earlier this year our new chairman Tohar Tal will soon be submitting a paper on the first full-season description of Batumi spring raptor migration to a peer-reviewed ornithological journal. Now a student at University of Groningen (NL), Tohar will describe spring abundance and timing of raptors in Batumi for the first time, and also contrast seasonal flight paths through the bottleneck.
The spring data are also being included in a study of sex differences in seasonal migration timing of Pernis and Circus species at Batumi, led by Marc Heetkamp. Marc completed a literature study on this topic as part of his education at the University of Utrecht (NL) last spring, and is now proceeding with analyses.
Beyond using just count data, Elien Hoekstra is using digital photography to study the moult of migrant raptors. Elien got a great grade for her dissertation at Van Hall University of Applied Sciences this year (NL). Now a MSc student at Wageningen University (NL), Elien aspires to publish her interesting results in a reputable ornithology journal.
In addition to the more advanced projects above, several students have initiated new projects after participating in this year’s autumn count. Two of them are actually combining BRC data with high-quality count data of other sites to look at larger scale patterns in migration.
For example, some species like Black Kite are known to migrate much earlier in the western than the eastern flyway (Fig1, top panel). Michaëla Berdougo, based at Lund University (SW), obtained data from count sites in the French and Spanish Basque country — situated at the same latitude as Batumi — to investigate how common it is for different (sub) species to show differences between western and eastern flyways, and why this may be.
Isaac West, geography student at the University of Cambridge (UK), is using historic count data from SPNI in Israel from 1990-2013 and BRC data from 2011-2022 to study whether raptor migration timing has shifted in our flyway in response to climate warming. Against our expectations, his results indicate that autumn raptor timing has changed very little over the past 3 decades!
Zooming in on the Batumi bottleneck again, Joachim Pintens completed a full-season internship as assistant coordinator, and is now proceeding with a study of Booted Eagle migration for a BSc. Dissertation at Ghent University of Applied Sciences and Arts (BE). He is comparing the seasonal abundance and timing of dark morph and light morph individuals, which may offer clues about the geographic origin of these birds.
Number of flocks of different sizes recorded at BRC during standardized daily time periods (sunrise + 1h to sunset – 2h) during 11 autumn counts since 2011.
Finally, our long-time president Dries Engelen is preparing a descriptive study of European Roller migration at Batumi. The abundance, and especially the occurrence of loose but large flocks in Batumi (as many as 240 birds together, Fig2) seems to be rather unique in the world. After consulting many specialists and old literature from across the species range we’ll be writing up our findings soon.