Now Open Access: From migration counts to conservation in a flyway under threat
In the August 2020 issue of British Birds, we published a long-form paper on Batumi Raptor Count. It summarises the 12-year history of BRC, provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season, and outlines some of our education and conservation plans for the future. We are happy to announce this article has now been made available open access, for everyone to read.
Photo by David Erterius.
On top of that, Wim Bovens and Olivier Dochy, have kindly offered to translate the article to Dutch for our audience in Belgium and The Netherlands. This translation was published in Natuur.oriolus and is now available open access too.
Abstract
Since 2008, the Batumi Raptor Count project has monitored the autumn migration of raptors at Batumi, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in southwest Georgia. What started as an expedition by young birders has become an invaluable project for monitoring raptor populations in the little-studied east African–Palearctic flyway. Autumn raptor migration through the Batumi bottleneck is notable for globally important concentrations of Honey-buzzards Pernis apivorus, Montagu’s Circus pygargus, Pallid C. macrourus and Marsh Harriers C. aeruginosus and accounts for at least 1% of the global breeding population of ten raptor species. By stimulating migration-based ecotourism, the project has had a significant economic impact on the communities where the count stations are located, which has increased societal and political support to reduce the widespread illegal raptor shooting in the region; it has also developed an important educational role for schoolchildren and older students. This paper summarises the 12-year history of the Batumi Raptor Count, and provides a detailed description of a typical autumn migration season. The project aims to expand its education and conservation remit while continuing to monitor one of the world’s biggest raptor migration bottlenecks.
Download the articles
Article in British Birds
English
Article in Natuur.oriolus
Dutch