Bird Artwork by Jérôme Wey
BRC is happy to announce our collaboration with Jérôme Wey!
Jérôme is an artist and keen French birdwatcher, currently living in southern France. Largely influenced by his travels and the graffiti culture, his art, mostly birds, are realistics and highly colourful tending to explore a more modern approach than the traditional naturalist art. His bird drawings are treated as human portraits with a certain pride and eminence while conserving vulnerability. He has generously offered to sell his drawings to raise money for the BRC.
“I have always been passionate about nature and animals, birds hold a special place in my life. As such and aware of the challenges and threats that weigh on them, especially during their migration, it seems essential to me to protect them. This is where the Batumi Raptor Count comes in. The BRC is doing tremendous work to collect valuable data, to involve local people as well as their desire to limit the impact of hunting and poaching. So, when the opportunity presented itself to me to be able to help the BRC, I did not hesitate for a second.” - Jérôme
Check out Jérôme’s work on his Instagram, Facebook or his website!
Jérôme’s bird drawings are available as prints in A4 format, or as an original. The drawings are made with mixed materials including acrylic paints, alcohol markers and colour pencils. There is one original available or 20 prints, each print is unique on its own as Jérôme adds more details after printing. Originals are made on white grain paper, prints are available on glossier paper.
Drawings are shipped worldwide from France in a cardboard envelope, delivery times range from 3-15 days. Shipping is included in the price.
For now there are four drawings available, but hopefully we are able to add other prints in the future!
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!
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!