‘Fight for Flight’
During our 2023 Autumn count, Heather Fortune volunteered with us. "Fight for Flight" is the title of her year-long solo expedition, contributing to ornithological research and conservation across Europe and Asia.
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Tohar first counted at Batumi in 2018 and joined the team two years later. He has been instrumental in running our first official full season spring counts from 2019. As BRC's chair, Tohar oversees the organisation and leads the fundraising and strategic planning that keeps each season's count on its feet.
Read more about Tohar on our team page
During our 2023 Autumn count, Heather Fortune volunteered with us. "Fight for Flight" is the title of her year-long solo expedition, contributing to ornithological research and conservation across Europe and Asia.
For sixteen 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.
This year, the BRC had the honor of hosting three counters, Can Yeniyurt, Kadri Kaya, and Cemil Cezgin, from the brand-new Bosphorus bird migration count sites in Turkey.
With the funding for 2024 complete, we have started preparations for the count! The count will run from the 12th of August until the 21st of October.
Since 2021 we’ve been constantly running crowdfunding campaigns to be able to fund our autumn counts, much-needed equipment, and other practical aspects of our monitoring and conservation efforts.
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.
In 2019 and 2020 we carried out the first and second spring pilot counts in the Batumi bottleneck, revealing a very different composition of raptor migration compared to autumn. We're looking for volunteers to join us for the third and final spring count in 2022.
The most recent autumn issue of the Sandgrouse, published by OSME, contains a short paper describing preliminary results of Black Kites obtained during the two BRC spring counts conducted so far.
This year the third pilot spring count was supposed to be conducted. Sadly, after many considerations, we hereby announce that the count has officially been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.