1.5 Million raptors!
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!
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!
We’ve broken the season record of 1,422,171 raptors set in 2021! At 14:52 today, the 1,422,172nd bird crossed our transect line to the east - a juvenile Black Kite making its way through the misty clouds.
It was a day full of suspense. We only needed a little over 10.000 more birds. We extracted every single one of them out of the bright blue sky.
Today we counted over 100K birds, which means we reached the half a million milestone!
The 3rd pilot Spring Count is already halfway through, we have been counting for one and a half months and have already counted 400k raptors this season.
Yesterday's highlights were the more than 100,000 raptors counted by both stations and the almost 1,700 eagles on Station 1, but we fell just short of the million.
The best day of the season on Station 2! So far.
The birds may not care, but we do: today we passed the 500,000 raptors mark!
We have now been counting for 12 days and yesterday we passed the first milestone of the season: we have counted the first 100,000 birds! The start of the season has been everything but standard this autumn.
Today added another 75.000 to the tally. Our volunteers have been counting for exactly 3 weeks now, and have reached a season total of 498.928 raptors! Almost half a million, right? Six more weeks to go, bring it!
After 7 weeks of counting in autumn 2015 we reached again the season total of 1 million raptors! Steppe Buzzard migration finally kicked off and we counted over 120 000 birds during 3rd, 4th and 5th of October.
The first 3 weeks of raptor migration counting in Batumi are over and we can already say that the start of this season was a big surprise.
On 2nd October 2014 our counting team witnessed the largest passage of raptors ever seen outside of the Panamerican Flyway and counted 264.891 raptors in a single day!
Few days ago on August 30th we were happy to report to you our all time record of 99,000 Honey Buzzards passing our observatories.
The unique convergence of migratory raptors in Georgia is strongly shaped by the weather conditions in the region, something the BRC team has long observed firsthand.
it has been about two weeks since the start of count and in that time approx. 100.000 Honey Buzzards Pernis aviporus passed the Batumi bottleneck. This included over 60.000 individuals on August 24th.