Over the past years we have been getting more and more surprised reactions from volunteers and visitors about the fact that Batumi Raptor Count is a 100% volunteer-based organisation.
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.
We are glad to be back counting raptors again! Fed up with all the darkness in our lives recently, our designers have created a more colorful T-shirt than ever before.
Since 2008, in over a decade of counts, over 380 volunteers have participated in the annual Batumi Raptor Count. This year, the 13th count is organized, which runs from August 12th until October 21st of 2021.
A short film directed by Nicholas Rodd about migration through the Georgian bottleneck has been selected by the British Documentary Festival, and is free to watch until May 14th.
Have you missed counting raptors as much as we have? If so, we have good news for you: the application round for the BRC volunteer raptor counter positions is now open!
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.
We approach the future with hope in our hearts and have started planning the BRC Autumn Count 2021. The count will run from the 12th of August until the 21st of October.
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.