Spring Report 2022

by Elien Hoekstra & Erik Jansen

This year on March 1st we started our third and final spring count in Sakhalvasho, Georgia. It was not without mixed feelings that we decided to start the spring count. On the one hand we were excited to be back for spring after having to cancel our 2021 spring count due to Covid. On the other hand the war in Ukraine started a few days prior to the count, and it felt strange to go and count birds in Georgia with so much suffering going on. Nevertheless, we consider that the BRC is about people as much as it is about birds (read our post here). We have hosted many wonderful volunteers from many nations, whose love for birds and nature brings them together. These volunteers built memories together and formed friendships across national and cultural borders. We hope that we can learn to grow towards each other and build the foundations for a better, peaceful future.

The count ran from March 1st until May 26th and we counted 572,642 raptors migrating north through the Batumi bottleneck. The season started off slow with cold temperatures and snow. A lot of snow. In fact, the first weeks of the season saw such bad weather that the team was able to count a meagre 68 hours during the first 3 weeks of the season! That’s an average of just 3 hours and 15 minutes per day — not what we came to Batumi for!! Thankfully, our team consisted of only two counters then. There were several consecutive days with constant heavy snow, blanketing the stunning Adjarian landscape with a thick layer of snow well into March. Quite nice, but not nice for birds to migrate through, or for our team to be outside.

Whenever we were able to go outside and look for birds though, we were so delighted, and seeing the birds with such amazing light conditions (snow beautifully reflects light onto the birds) was a blessing! Low numbers of birds made their way through, giving us ample time to enjoy every single individual and take photos whenever they were close enough. We were so enthused to see adult Imperial Eagles almost every time we went outside to count, for example on March 14th when we observed 11 individuals — not something we are used to seeing during our autumn counts. The first weeks of the count were altogether, thanks to the good numbers of Imperial Eagles combined with several large flocks of Common Cranes, still a big success! The mildly disappointing weather, and very cold feet, clearly couldn’t stand in our way.

We saw a total of 480 Cranes this season. This is a species that is welcomed with enthusiasm each time we see them, and hearing their trumpeting calls as they fly-by is always magical. They might also be among the easiest birds to pick up, as evidenced by a flock of 19 Cranes that was first spotted by some of our team-members in the Batumi city centre, and ten minutes later passed by the station in gorgeous evening light. All in all we got really good numbers this year, with 112 individuals on the 5th of March and even 182 on the 14th of March. 

After such a long period of snow and very little counting, on the 21st of March the skies had cleared up, the sun was shining, team reinforcements had just arrived (such impeccable timing!) and we had (only) the 4th full day of counting this season including the first Pallid Harrier (adult male) of the season. We were still standing in 30cm of snow, but that didn’t matter because migration was on!

So far almost every day this season we had seen Imperial Eagles, mostly adult birds, but by this time we were seeing more immature birds. On the 23rd of March we saw a record breaking 26 Imperial Eagles as well as 27 Long-legged Buzzards! Apart from these record-breaking numbers this was also the first day with over one thousand birds. We counted more than 2000 Black Kites and knew very well: more was still to come!

It was only a couple of days later on March 25th that we got our first day with more than ten thousand birds. We saw over 7000 Black Kites, 3000 Steppe Buzzards and hundreds of large eagles. We had  incredible numbers of 53 Greater Spotted Eagles, 20 Imperial Eagles, 204 Short-toed Eagles, 37 Long-legged Buzzards, 20 Hen Harriers and the first Booted Eagles of the season, but that wasn’t all. The highlight of the day was an adult female Rough-legged Buzzard! This species only winters in the far east of Georgia and is very rarely recorded by the BRC. This individual was the first (but not last) individual ever recorded during the spring count!

Even though we were standing in the snow and temperatures were low, the streams of raptors passing over the snow-covered mountains were a sight to behold. And more importantly, the birds were illuminated from below by the sunlight reflecting off the snow, making for unique views and a magical atmosphere. Every single raptor just lit up and we were able to see every tiny detail! Even the Steppe Buzzards, otherwise way too easily ignored, looked straight up amazing in this light.

The next days were chaotic, with large and messy streams of thousands of Black Kites in every direction, but surprise visits of a Cinereous Vulture, Griffon Vulture and a juvenile Imperial Eagle chasing after an injured Steppe Buzzard definitely brightened up the count.

However, while these days already felt rather chaotic, nothing could have prepared us for the 28th of March. The day started out with snow, hail and thunder so only half of the team went up to count the 2500 raptors that passed in the morning. But then, when the weather cleared up in the afternoon... BOOM! An eruption of migrating raptors came in, and the rest of the team had to rush to the station to help out, it was absolute chaos! In only half an hour 10,000 raptors came bursting through the bottleneck! This is Batumi! By the end of the day we had counted 22K birds, of which 10,642 Black Kites, 9091 Steppe Buzzards, 294 Short-toed Eagles, 2 Egyptian Vultures, a distant Golden Eagle and a Greater Spotted Eagle of the fulvescens morph!

The end of March continued with increasing numbers of Black Kites, Steppe Buzzards, Booted Eagles and the weather changing from cold and snowy to hot and sunny. Tens of thousands of Black Kites, however, kept streaming through the bottleneck on the daily. On March 30th we even  had the 5th best day ever for this species in Batumi with an impressive 29,050 birds! Up to this point  our season was set to 125,000 raptors!

After the storms of birds in March, the morning of the 1st of April started out rather calm, with beautiful views of several harriers including 3 stunning Pallid Harriers and the season’s first Montagu’s Harrier. The streams of Black Kites over sea were rather calm compared to previous mornings, and we noticed something was off: the trees in front of the station kept having several Black Kites sitting there all morning. Apparently they were waiting for the afternoon, because from noon onwards all hell broke loose! Massive numbers of raptors made their way through the bottleneck, so many that we were unable to identify many of the birds in the mixed streams of Black Kites and Steppe Buzzard. In fact, we even set a (doubtful) record by counting 21,813 medium raptors. It was frustrating to  let so many raptors pass unidentified, but we should note that over 80% of the 56.4K birds that day showed up in the afternoon, often in distant streams! Despite our small counting team,  many team members had experienced such chaos before, and with the help of some adrenaline they did an amazing job! A special thanks goes out to OSME, for helping fund the participation of our four Georgian counters this spring. It is great to share the experience of spring raptor migration with them and we are especially happy to see their enthusiasm and willingness to inspire others by returning together with local students.

The following days we continued to count over 28K birds (of which more than 13K Black Kites) daily. However, the (weather) circumstances made counting rather difficult during these days. The 2nd of April had birds constantly migrating from west to east, zigzagging through the bottleneck. And on April 4th strong winds seemed to come from all directions and caused birds to dance up and down in the wind like the kites you play with at the beach. Luckily, there were some very nice highlights such as high numbers of harriers, a Golden Eagle, hundreds of Sparrowhawks, 6 Ospreys in a day and several 2nd calendar year Imperial Eagles.

From the 5th of April onwards weather circumstances were rather windy with fog and periods of rain. We had to evacuate our exposed spring count station several times to take cover at the observatory Station 1. Nevertheless, we counted thousands of birds as well as another Rough-legged Buzzard and Cinereous Vulture! By the 8th of April we could add another 8900 Black Kites to the season total, pushing us across the 200,000 mark for this species!

The 9th of April was off to a good start with a foraging Red-rumped Swallow in the yard while brushing our teeth, as well as 5 Ospreys, an Egyptian Vulture and a close fly-by of a beautiful Pallid Harrier (adult male) during the day. Though, the absolute marvel(s) of the day were -not one, but two- Rough-legged Buzzards! That meant we had seen 4 individuals this season alone, while this species had only been recorded 4 times before in BRC history! BOOM!

As we approached mid-April we were counting 10K+ raptors each day, with the vast majority still being Black Kites and Steppe Buzzards, and while we had seen Red-rumped Swallows, Common Redstarts and the first Swift already earlier, on the 10th of April it finally felt like spring had sprung for real. An ensemble of passerines around the station kept us entertained, with Red-breasted and Semi-collared Flycatchers in the trees, and a Red-rumped Swallow fluttering and calling around us. Impressive weather phenomena were the finishing touches that day with halos, rainbows and sun dogs, absolutely stunning!

Even though we came to count raptors, we always thoroughly enjoyed the other wildlife around the station. The passerines were great, with a special highlight being the Sardinian Warbler, which has shown up each spring season, singing around the station, but we were also entertained by bumblebees, butterflies and even a weasel which made several appearances on station.

Intermezzo

Chorokhi Delta

By mid-April several team members had spent hundreds of hours on station, and the days only grew longer towards the end of the season. We all know it is important to take a break at some point. Luckily the Chorokhi delta, just south of Batumi, offers some ideal conditions for relaxed spring birding.

As always, the team organised several trips to the Chorokhi delta, and observed an amazing total of 199 species there this season. The area is an important stop-over site for so many species, and throughout the season one can observe a wide variety of shorebirds, waterfowl, passerines, raptors and other birds. For example, the team found 33 different shorebirds, with amazing highlights such as Greater Sand Plovers and White-tailed Lapwings. The former were observed frequently between the start of April and mid-May, while the latter were seen several times between mid-April and mid-May and fit a pattern of increased observations in SE Europe this spring.

Regular interesting birds that are often seen in the Chorokhi delta include White-winged and Whiskered Terns, Slender-billed Gulls, Ferruginous Ducks, Little Crakes, Yelkouan Shearwaters, hundreds (if not thousands) of Black-throated Divers, Glossy Ibises, all European herons and egrets, Moustached warblers, Great Reed Warblers, Barred Warblers, Red-throated Pipits and many more! 

Apart from these regular cool birds and the aforementioned rare shorebirds, several other scarce species showed up in the Chorokhi delta this spring. On April 22nd the team flushed a Great Snipe, and found a Sardinian and Menetries’s Warbler together in the bush next to where the Great Snipe had been sitting! Additionally, an interesting looking falcon was found on May 13th that was too far away to identify, but looked really good for Eleonora’s Falcon before it disappeared in the distance. We told each other “let’s forget about this bird really quickly”, while someone else jokingly suggested “maybe it will come back!” Well, that actually happened! 10 minutes after we had lost sight of the bird, a team member shouted “Falcon!”, announcing a relatively close incoming falcon that we managed to get good views of as well as good photographs. Boom!! An unmistakable Eleonora’s Falcon! The last major delta highlight was during our last trip on May 22nd: a solitary bee-eater flying south in a straight line turned out to be all green with reddish underwings: a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater! An amazing bird to end the Chorokhi delta season with!

Back to the raptors then … As we entered the second half of April we traditionally got the first Honey Buzzard of the season! More specifically, an adult male flew by close to the station on April 16th, while many more were hopefully still to come! These days we were also seeing a shift of predominantly Black Kites to Steppe Buzzards, increasing numbers of Booted eagles, and several dark morph Marsh Harriers made an appearance.

Similarly to the previous spring counts we counted far fewer Harriers than in autumn and for most of the species 2020 saw slightly bigger numbers. Yet we still managed to count 2423 Marsh Harriers, 121 Pallid Harriers, 85 Montagu’s Harriers and 169 Hen Harriers (and 400 Mon/Pal/Hen). For Hen Harriers however, spring is certainly the better season as we count almost 4 times as many individuals compared to autumn. This has most likely to do with the phenology of the migration of this species. With the spring count we are able to cover their peak migration, whereas in autumn the count might end too early to cover their full migration period.

While 2020 saw the record number of Black Kites (282,816 in total), we still saw an amazing number of 272K this year. We could often see kites already early in the morning streaming and kettling over sea, with almost pure Black Kite streams in the beginning of the season, , while  later on in the season  the kites would start to come in mixed streams with Steppe Buzzards and, eventually, Honey Buzzards. Something especially enjoyable were the streams of Black Kites late in the afternoon/evening, because that is when they would start foraging during their migration. These calm streams could often be seen in the East, with Black Kites making acrobatic loopings to catch -very tiny- insects. We had never seen this kind of in-flight foraging behaviour during the autumn migration, and it was a first for us during the spring-count of 2019 and 2020 (read our paper on this behaviour here). This season we were able to observe this behaviour again and even saw food transfers (or perhaps kleptoparasitism?) between individuals!

Towards the end of April, even though numbers of birds had decreased, we were still counting several thousands of birds each day while Golden Orioles and Bee-eaters had shown up as well. It took a while for Honey Buzzard numbers to increase after we saw the first male on April 16th, but we finally had the first 100+ Honey Buzzard day on the 26th of April. No less than 417 individuals mixed in with lots of Black Kites and Steppe Buzzards. This season, however, we counted far fewer Honey Buzzards compared to the previous two seasons, but more on that later! For now our fun wasn’t spoiled,  as this year the Crested Honey Buzzards did very well. We were able to identify 19(!) individuals, compared to 3 in 2019 and 1 in 2020, and were quite surprised to get a total of 7 Crested on the 10th of May alone. Impressive- stuff!

While the Honey Buzzards were well on their way, we were still waiting for the first Levant Sparrowhawk to arrive. Our waiting was finally rewarded on the  27th of April, when we recorded  74 Levant Sparrowhawks, including one flock of 23 individuals! Even though big flocks, read thousands, of Levants were  reported from Israel a few days prior, we were amazed to see this many individuals already on the first day they appeared. Totally unexpected. But we were in for a surprise! The very next day we counted a record number of Levant Sparrowhawks with 1103 individuals! Wow! Crazy numbers, with several flocks exceeding 90 birds, and  the biggest flock consisting of 114 birds!

May started off with on and off days of counting and no counting due to bad weather. Nonetheless we were rewarded with  a beautiful adult male Crested Honey Buzzard perched in a tree near the station on the 3rd of May. The real highlight however was us, thanks to  another 13.5K birds counted that day, reaching the 500,000 birds mark! 

The days continued with rainy, cloudy weather, after which it cleared up in the afternoon of the 8th of May. We counted lots of 2cy Lesser Spotted Eagles, and several thousands of Honey Buzzards. With 5523 HBs that day, and clear weather predicted, we prematurely noted in the Trektellen comments: “Now that the bad weather spell seems to have come to an end, let’s hope the Honey Buzzard numbers skyrocket in the upcoming couple of days!!”. Sadly, this season didn’t see skyrocketing numbers of HB’s as the peak day on May 25th ‘only’ saw 7541 Honey Buzzards In the end we recorded an exceptionally low number of 35K Honey Buzzards, compared to 43.6K in 2020 and 88.7K in 2019. These pilot spring counts, however,  have shown us that in general Honey Buzzards are far less numerous in spring, compared to the half a million we count in autumn.

The following days weather cleared up and it was hot and sunny, resulting in thousands of (medium) raptors in the far, far East and the streams that came closer by were often very chaotic with a dizzying mix of Black Kites, Honey Buzzards and Steppe Buzzards. Although these counts left us somewhat unsatisfied, we happily noted down some  highlights in the form of Crested Honey Buzzards, an Egyptian Vulture and 12 Common Cranes.

On the 14th of May we participated in the Global Big Day, which meant we counted every bird around the station instead of just the protocol species; exciting! While the day was rather slow in terms of raptors, it was as if the non-raptors knew today was the day we were paying (extra) attention to them, because apart from 7550 Swifts and 876 Bee-eaters we saw an astonishing 2023 Rosy Starlings migrating south! The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as this was the first day we saw Rosy Starling migrating this season! Even several Lesser Grey Shrikes and Alpine Swifts showed up for this day.

The next few days remained more of the same, with high temperatures and a lot of sun, resulting once again in low numbers of birds with only some trickling through in the far East.  Not the most exciting times to be stuck on a hilltop days on end, however, we kept ourselves entertained with a close-by Long-legged Buzzard, a Roller perched near station, and of course the never-ending sound of extremely chatty Bee-eaters making their way through the bottleneck.

The end of the count was, just like in 2020, characterised by several days without counting due to stormy weather and heavy rain. On the days that we could actually start a count, it was usually not much better with a lot of sun and a clear, usually empty, blue sky. Almost needless to say, these days numbers of birds were also significantly lower, with only around a thousand birds a day of which most were Honey Buzzards. A short, highly unexpected, outburst of migration however occurred on the 21st of May when we had a very nice day with 19 Short-toed Eagles and 14 Booted Eagles.

Even more unexpected was the relatively intense migration on May 25th, when we had this seasons’ ‘peak’ day of  Honey Buzzards  with over 7.5K birds!  Throughout the  day we saw streams of HB’s in every direction, mixed in with Black Kites, Steppe Buzzards and large eagles. Added bonuses were a single Common Crane,  2 Egyptian Vultures and 2 Crested Honey Buzzards! To top it all up we flushed a nightjar upon leaving the station, we even got the luxury of observing it for several minutes as it landed in a tree right in front of us.  

The last day of the count was once again hot and sunny, with most birds far away. Nonetheless, we manage to count over 1200 birds, with two Black Storks and a Common Crane flying by to say their farewell.

Ultimately, we had a great season with 572,642 raptors counted in 539 hours by a wonderful team of counters. Special highlights this season were the crazy numbers of Imperial Eagles, Crested Honey Buzzards and Rough-legged Buzzards!

We would like to give our special thanks to everyone who helped to make this project happen: our ever enthusiastic and eager volunteers; our always hospitable and loving host family; OSME for their financial support; the Tourism department of Batumi; Gerard Troost and www.trektellen.nl; and of course our loyal followers on Trektellen and our social media channels.

Stay tuned for our paper on spring migration in the Batumi bottleneck! Thank you all!

This year’s spring count was made possible by: