12-08-2019 — It's not just raptors in the bottleneck
The sky, photographed at 400mm, chockfull of dragonflies. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
12-08-2019
In 2019 we started the count officially on the 12th of August for the first time. We made the decision to start a week earlier to avoid missing the earliest migrants, so as hoped and expected the first days of the 2019 season were very slow. What we ‘missed’ in terms of raptors, however, was made up for by absolutely mind-boggling migration of Dragonflies. During the early days of the season hundreds of thousands of them — if not more — headed south. Even for someone who intentionally tries to avoid the Dragonfly-craze that’s growing among birders lately (as I enjoy the low-period for birding in summer and don’t feel like adding ANOTHER addiction to an already long list): it was a fantastic sight to behold. The photos and video really don’t do justice to the massive movement we witnessed, but they should give a vague idea. In the end, it’s clear that the Batumi bottleneck is not just home to some of the best raptor migration in the world, but also of visible insect migration.
Not as skilled a dragonfly photographer as a bird photographer, but when there’s so many around… Photo by Bart Hoekstra.