Wouter Vansteelant

GREAT DAY FOR EEL CONSERVATION
The Basque Country is the craddle of glass eel consumption
Today, the Basque Government has announced a ban on glass eel fishing due to eel's critical situation
Similar movements needed in Spanish @miteco.gob.es and EU @ec.europa.eu
www.eldiario.es/euskadi/gobi...

Today's totals! See our website for more details!

Steppe Buzzards. Photo by Filiep T'jollyn

After-count team photo - with perhaps the most beautiful rainbow ever seen in the background

170.000 RAPTORS IN ONE DAY!

After yesterday’s heavy rain and a quiet morning, today the sky exploded with Steppe Buzzards and large eagles! Continuing from 10 am until almost the end of the count.

At some point, we counted over 14.000 raptors in less than 20 minutes. THAT'S BATUMI!

#ornithology

After a super intense week with a back-to-back Spoonbill and Wader Study conference, its time to shift to lower gear for a bit. Starting the day with a slow stroll through the fog at Griene Dyk. Hoping for a Yellow-browed Warbler among the plentiful Gold- and Firecrests. #birding

Lesser Spotted Eagle - Photo by Eduardo Campos Wals

Lesser Spotted Eagle - Photo by Matthew Sprangers

Black Kite (left) and Steppe Eagle (right) - Photo by Matthew Sprangers

Lesser Spotted Eagle - Photo by Filiep T'jollyn

After the thrill of reaching the million, we went straight to the peak of diversity. The challenge of counting high numbers of birds slowly shifted into identifying the (relatively) fewer but more difficult ones: the large eagle species!

But they also brought a special guest along...👇

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Thank you to all of today's speakers for a really interesting array of talks! So much great research, and more on the way tomorrow! #IWSG2025 #waders #shorebirds #ornithology

What an honour to open the 50th @waderstudy.bsky.social conference with a plenary on Spoonbill migration culture on the beautiful stage of DOT in Groningen. The Spoonbill-inspired concerto 'Solanum' by Tjibbe Stelwagen and Caspar Kootstra made for a perfect tandem wt the arts. #ornithology

We're got a variety of great talks at our conference today, with topics including...

👥️ Population development
💧 Resource use
☀️ Responses to environmental change
🪱 Foraging ecology and diet

#IWSG2025 #waders #shorebirds #Ornithology

Here we go then! Our 50th annual conference is officially open 🥳 #IWSG2025

The colour-marked Sanderling photographed in Israel, still carrying its radiotransmitter

A vagrant juvenile Sanderling turned up in Israel—likely after a single non-stop flight from the Dutch Wadden Sea. Here’s thread explaining why that’s remarkable and interesting. @wadertales.bsky.social @globalflyway.bsky.social #Birds #Migration

Well spotted, Tohar. But at that point she was already floating on the waves for almost 7hours. Looks like LAYLA hit the waves at 09:07 on the 25th, a few kms further offshore.

A dramatic end for an ambitious Spoonbill. Yday morning LAYLA crashed into the ocean just offshore Madeira, 56h after departing from the Wadden Sea. She rested barely 7h even though she found nice Spoonbill hotspots on the way. Poor choices... #ornithology
www.globalflywaynetwork.org/tracks/speci...

Marsh Harrier. Photo by Nikolina Bukovac

Short-toed Eagle and Black Kite. Photo by Nikolina Bukovac.

Greater Spotted Eagle. Photo by Nikolina Bukovac.

Where are the birds? Somewhere up there in the blue sky!

A true Bluesky — filled with raptors!

After days of rain, we were greeted by a bright, blue, cloudless sky this morning! The result? Thousands of birds and a high species diversity.

With the main message: the eagles are coming!

Stay tuned for more! For daily totals: www.batumiraptorcount.org/data

The www.BirdEyes.org team is thrilled to announce a new paper by Mohamed Henriques showing how Spoonbills change space use over the course of their summer stay in the eastern Dutch Wadden Sea. After breeding, many adults converge in the Lutjewad area. #ornithology

www.birdeyes.org/lutjewad-amo...

Yday >1900 #Spoonbills left 🇳🇱 via the watch-site at Cadzand!

Among them were 4 GPS-birds that departed from the Delta, including LUNA who met PLUK in flight over Ostend (🇧🇪).

Meanwhile, TAAS and HIDDE jointly flew from Balgzand to the Delta. #ornithology

www.globalflywaynetwork.org/tracks/speci...

Astounding for the @batumiraptorcount.org crew to reach the 1 million milestone so early in the season. 😳 Congrats to all volunteers and flyway trainees, expertly led by the first ever all-women coordinating team: Eva Drukker, Elien Hoekstra and Mitra Daneshvar. Celebrations are in order! 🤩

This achievement was only possible thanks to our amazing and hard-working team – counters, trainees, coordinators – and our wonderful host families for their endless hospitality.

Check out our daily counts and news flashes here: www.batumiraptorcount.org/data

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50+ is heel goed aantal voor Zwettepoel! Mijn max daar is dikke 80 in oktober.

A Goshawk managed to catch a Snipe at Blaugerzen the other day. Then got the attention of one, two, three Marsh Harriers. In the squabble, a juvenile harrier was eventually able to claim the prey for itself. #birding

Processing large rasters using terra package for R: combining tiling and time-series modeling Processing large rasters using terra package for R: combining tiling and time-series modeling

Had a privilege and pleasure to teach terra pkg (created by @roberthijmans.bsky.social et al.) and spatial sampling with R together with Alexandre Wadoux at the #EOSummerSchool2025 at WICC. You can follow the terra tutorial from here: differ.blog/p/processing...
📹: youtu.be/q9sQkg7BeAc?...

Large kettle of Honey Buzzards

A single Honey Buzzard flying low through the bottleneck

A stunning juvenile Black Kite

The Honey Buzzards keep on coming!

With another 50K+ counted today, we’ve now passed half a million HBs this season! Rising numbers of Black Kites — as their peak is still ahead — pushed our overall total past
700K! And it’s not just the bulk species 👇

#ornithology
📸Eduardo C. Wals
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🚨 Calling researchers, students, technicians in cognition 🚨

We’re running a 10-min anonymous survey on how animal cognition is defined and studied across disciplines (from ecology, ethology, psychology, neurology, etc). 🧠✨

Scan the QR code & share widely

#AnimalCognition #ResearchSurvey #Science

Foremost, we found it an exciting experience to publish our scientific debate in such a public manner, and thank @moveandconserve.bsky.social and co-authors for the constructive and cordial discussion!

Exciting times ahead — only together can we connect birds, people & places across the flyway!

One million raptors: But where do they come from? — Batumi Raptor Count As a migration counter, you can’t help but wonder: “Where did the bird I just tallied come from, and where is it going?” In light of BRC’s main aim — monitoring raptor population trends — this very ...

A new study led by @moveandconserve.bsky.social used GPS tracking to test the monitoring potential of Eilat and Batumi.

An invaluable step toward linking counted birds to their origins, but we found it needed some elaboration from a migration count perspective!

Our commentary: tinyurl.com/nnbzu7kc

The first week of September is barely behind us and already the impressive volunteer crew of @batumiraptorcount.org has tallied over half a million raptors making their way south along the eastern Black Sea coast. #ornithology

A juvenile Black Kite

An immature Short-toed Eagle

We are experiencing a particularly exciting season so far! For example, we've counted exceptionally high numbers of Short-toed Eagles, Marsh Harriers, and Black Kites!

Meanwhile, we're not even halfway through the season yet, with still so much to come.

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Photos by Eduardo C. Wals & Paul Buntfuß

Luckily, we have a great team of counters, trainees, and coordinators to count and identify the many thousands of raptors heading their way!

Make sure to check out our daily count updates and season totals here: www.batumiraptorcount.org/data

Stay tuned for more news from #BRC17!

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Using GPS tracking data to validate the conservation value of bird migration counts Effective conservation of migratory birds requires gathering of information about their population trends, often acquired using migratory bird counts.…

Science as a conversation:

In January, we published a paper about migratory bird counts www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For different reasons, we did not include the managers of the bird counts. But the @batumiraptorcount.org people had some important comments
#conservation #ornithology 🧪🐾🌎

Ten days ago #Whimbrel LYTSE GRIENE went off radar after many weeks in Cádiz. A sign the bird had continued south, confirmed a few days later: after a 50+h flight to Guinea-Bissau, and a 5day stop in Liberia, he made it all the way to Ghana! #ornithology
www.globalflywaynetwork.org/tracks/speci...

Current position of all Dutch GPS-tracked Spoonbills alive today.

Last weeks tracks of Miguel and Stern, including their first migratory flight on Sept 5th. Both birds flew roughly 24h non-stop and flew together for 9h from the Dutch-Belgian border till Le Havre (France).

Miguel and Stern met each other IN FLIGHT around noon on Sept 5th.

Miguel and Stern split up again after 9h of joint flight, each continuing flight for another 5-9h to different stop-overs along France's Atlantic coastline.

Migration is a go! Yday 3 @globalflyway.bsky.social GPS-Spoonbills flew from 🇳🇱 to 🇫🇷. Among them were adults MIGUEL (orange) and STERN (purple) who met each other in flight at noon, and then flew together for 9h until they split up again south of Le Havre.
www.globalflywaynetwork.org/tracks/speci...

Zelden zag ik een motie die zó helder laat zien in wat voor zieke tijden we leven en wat er deze herfst op het spel staat