With the end of the year approaching, it gives us an opportunity to reflect. We’ve caught up with Miriam from our Bird Team who has been reminiscing about special moments captured on camera in 2019:

Back in September our Head of Development, Andy Hinton, and Bird Team member, Ben Cox, headed out to South Africa for our annual conservation field trip to Dronfield Nature Reserve, near Kimberley in the Northern Cape. They also spent some time in Mokala National Park and were lucky enough to take a trip to the Kalahari Desert in northern South Africa. This trip is bittersweet for those who attend. 

As part of our International Vulture Awareness Day celebrations we invited you to take part in our Creative Competition.

We are delighted to announce our second annual Marion Paviour Award goes to Diego Mendez for his project with King Vultures in central Bolivia. The purpose of our Marion Paviour Award is to further research into the conservation of birds of prey and is intended to support early-career researchers working towards this goal. Diego tells us a bit more about himself and his project:

Last month, Lawrie Hills joined our team as an intern in the Conservation and Research department. He’s already got stuck in to a variety of different projects so we’ve been catching up with him to find out a bit more about his work:

We’re pleased to announce that the overall winner of our 2018 Photographic Competition is Danny McCreadie for this stunning image he captured of two wild Peregrine Falcons. The image was taken in Morialta Conservation Park in south Australia. The image was selected as winner in the ‘In the Wild’ category by Oliver Smart and as overall winner by Trust president, Chris Packham. Find out more about entering our 2019 Photographic Competition.

In August 2018, a juvenile female Peregrine Falcon arrived at our National Bird of Prey Hospital™ with puncture wounds on her head and shoulder, and extensive feather damage on both wings. She has been recovering in our hospital for some time, and has an interesting story to tell!

June has proved to be a devastating month for the team at Hawk Conservancy Trust, near Andover, as they learned of more than 500 vultures killed in less than a month. More worrying now is the real concern that the Trust’s previous scientific predictions of vulture extinction are highly likely to occur earlier than calculated due to the continuing actions of poachers.

Last year, we asked our visitors to get creative for International Vulture Awareness Day (IVAD), encouraging all budding writers and poets amongst our followers to get in touch and share their work inspired by vultures or our work to support these endangered birds.

You may remember a recent post from Jess Green, a student studying Environmental Psychology at Surrey University. Jess conducted her BSc Psychology research at the Hawk Conservancy Trust; she investigated the effect of spending time in nature on our well-being with our visitors watching our Woodland Owl display. This is part of an ongoing research project we are conducting in collaboration with Surrey University. Read more about Jess’ research.