1.5 Million raptors!
Steppe Buzzard against the clouds hiding the Kvirike station. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
For the first time in BRC history, we have recorded a staggering 1.5 million raptors in a single autumn season — a true milestone after 17 years of counting!
After counting hundreds of thousands of Honey Buzzards, record-breaking numbers of Black Kites, and now endless streams of Steppe Buzzards, over the last days we’ve been amazed by the number of Long-legged Buzzards! With just today a new all-time day record of 87 individuals!
While our entire team is (of course) currently celebrating breaking these seasonal records for nearly all species, this milestone above all highlights the importance of the Batumi Bottleneck. Perfectly demonstrating why our work of monitoring and conserving raptor migration here is so important!
On a larger scale, as the Batumi Bottleneck represents just one key node in the network of migration corridors within the East African-Eurasian Flyway, we may ask ourselves: how much do we really know about the numbers and movement patterns of raptors across this flyway?
All the more reason to continue not only monitoring efforts here, but also at other well-known and newly discovered bottlenecks by different organisations across the region. Only by combining our knowledge and efforts can we truly understand and protect the migratory species that connect us all. This is something we are already working towards, for example, through our current flyway traineeship program — with more plans and ideas in the making!
Last but certainly not least, we want to thank everyone who made this possible: our coordinators, trainees, counters, the many generous donors who funded our work, OSME as our long-time collaborator and supporter, and Kite Optics for providing us with high-class equipment to count and identify all raptors!
The Station 1 team.
The Station 2 team.
The team of coordinators at station 3 — for a change.