For seventeen years, Batumi Raptor Count has tracked the legendary autumn raptor migration through the Batumi Bottleneck. Now, our first full study of spring migration along this flyway has been published open access in Ardea.
As a migration counter, you can’t help but wonder where the bird you just tallied came from, and where it is going. We look at a new study that helps answer this question for the raptors migrating through Batumi.
After returning from Georgia last year, with ‘only’ two Levant Sparrowhawks tagged out of eight anticipated individuals, our moods were down. But in autumn 2023 we gave it another chance.
We are proud to announce the publication of our first Russian language paper in the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network’s (RRRCN) journal ‘Raptors Conservation’.
Student interest in Batumi's raptor migration has grown so much that our Research Coordinator can barely keep up. Here's an overview of the research currently underway at BRC.
After 3 months of flying from woodland to woodland, often following river valleys and making longer stops on the way, ‘our’ Levant Sparrowhawk ‘Dudu’ is now sending data from the savannahs of Tanzania!
The third and final spring count gave us beautiful snow-covered surroundings and raptors in perfect light, we witnessed the return of birds and spring.
Batumi Raptor Count has long documented the causes and consequences of illegal raptor shooting in Georgia, but the role of traditional falconers remained a blind spot. Last autumn, BRC teamed up with Fauna & Flora International to explore whether a constructive alliance with ethical falconers is possible.
The Batumi Raptor Count has done extraordinary raptor migration monitoring for years, but apart from all the migration data we have been collecting for so long, the bottleneck offers another interesting possibility.
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.
A new Sandgrouse paper, initiated by Ben Jobson (BirdLife International), reviews the challenges and opportunities for monitoring of migratory soaring birds in the East African-Eurasian flyway.
In the August 2020 issue of British Birds, we published a long-form paper on Batumi Raptor Count.
Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has ground daily life to a halt for many of us, bird migration of course continued and so did our team of spring counters in Batumi.
We are proud to announce the current August issue of British Birds contains a long paper on Batumi Raptor Count.
The 12th season brought unprecedented numbers of Black Kites, a new raptor species for the BRC counts, and marked the start of an education project in collaboration with local teachers.
The 12th edition of the Batumi Raptor Count started differently than previous years, with a brand-new observation platform at Station 1 and an earlier start date. Read on for the season's highlights, from record-breaking rollers to a stunning dark morph Marsh Harrier.
For 8 important species for the bottleneck, we have analysed trends over the past 8 years of standardised counts (2011-2018).
After 11 years of autumn counts it was time for something completely different. This spring a group of 13 enthusiastic counters monitored the Batumi spring migration from March 21st until May 31st.
In 2008 Batumi Raptor Count made its first full-season count of migrating raptors along the eastern Black Sea coast.
In August 2017 a BRC team (Jonas Schärer, Xu Shi and Jaime Escobar) observed an Egyptian Nightjar in the Chorokhi Delta which turned out to be the first national record.
The freshly published BRC Autumn Report 2018 features season highlights, phenological peculiarities and general overview with many photos of both birds and people.
Our 10th Autumn count kicked off at 17th August, with the coordination team and first volunteers arriving to our headquarters in Sakhalvasho a few days before.
Our study on hunters' habits and motivations for shooting raptors in the Batumi bottleneck has been published in Sandgrouse, the journal of the Ornithological Society of the Middle East and the Caucasus (OSME). Congratulations to Anna Sandor, Johannes Jansen and Wouter Vansteelant!
Autumn report 2016 is ready
The 9th season of Batumi Raptor Count has reached the halfway point! Once again we're witnessing a rush of raptor migration, growing enthusiasm for raptor identification, and no shortage of surprises.
BRC continued its monitoring work with another successful season studying the raptor migration in the Batumi bottleneck. In autumn 2015 we managed to count a total of 1.029.478 raptors without double counts!
The first year of the systematic monitoring of the hunting pressure in the Batumi Bottleneck is slowly coming to its end.
Not only birdwatchers are keen on autumn raptor migration, the region around Batumi is also notorious for its raptor shooters. Although it is illegal in Georgia to shoot raptors, many get shot when passing the bottleneck.
With the experiences from 6 years counting raptors at Batumi we decided to discuss the protocol, our insights into the migration flow at the bottleneck and the integration of new ideas.
The Dutch ornithological journal Ardea has accepted our manuscript South West Georgia: an important bottleneck for raptor migration during autumn.
A while ago we announced the analysis of migration intensity and locality in function of weather at the Batumi bottleneck as a Msc. Thesis project by Jasper Wehrmann.
In autumn 2011, Nicolantonio Agostini and Michele Panuccio of MEDRAPTORS (the Mediterranean Raptor Migration Network) will join BRC to study the flight behaviour of migrating raptors at Batumi.