New publication in Ardea: The eastern Black Sea coast as a principal raptor flyway in spring
What is that? The BRC logo — an adult male Pallid Harrier — right on the cover of the latest Ardea issue! With a flock of Black Kites over Batumi city in the background.
For seventeen years, the Batumi Raptor Count monitored the legendary autumn migration of over one million raptors through the Batumi Bottleneck in the Republic of Georgia. The spring migration, however, had never been properly quantified.
In 2019, Tohar Tal and Diego Jansen decided it was time to change that, initiating the first full-season spring migration counts at Batumi, focusing on northbound raptors returning to their breeding grounds.
Over the course of three spring seasons (March–May), we counted hundreds of thousands of raptors. We are very excited to announce that our findings are now published open access in Ardea! See link below.
We provide the first comprehensive description of spring raptor migration along the eastern Black Sea flyway, discussing species’ abundance as well as phenology. We further compare abundance and phenological indicators of relatively common species at Batumi between spring and autumn. In doing so, we present new insights into the large-scale seasonal flows of raptor migration through the East African-Eurasian flyway as a whole. Comparisons to scant historical data further suggest intriguing changes in the timing of spring migration of certain species. We end with a consideration of the monitoring and conservation potential at Batumi in spring.
This work would not have been possible without the financial support of OSME and the many volunteers who helped count thousands of raptors!
