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. (more…)
As part of our International Vulture Awareness Day celebrations we invited you to take part in our Creative Competition. (more…)
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: (more…)
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:
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. (more…)
Thomas Johnson, a researcher associated with the Hawk Conservancy Trust and Leeds University, studied the breeding behaviour of White-backed Vultures at two sites near Kimberley in South Africa using camera traps on 10 nesting trees.
Four pairs of Asian White-backed Vultures are incubating eggs at our breeding centre in Changa Manga in Pakistan. If all eggs hatch, this will be the most successful year to date for the centre.
As part of an ongoing research project into the effect of nature on our health and well-being, the Hawk Conservancy Trust is hosting students from the University of Surrey. One of the students, Jess Green, tells us about her undergraduate dissertation project that she conducted here at the Trust. (more…)
2018 has been a productive year of vulture research and conservation activities for the Trust, so we’ve been looking back at some of the highlights of the year:
We love vultures and a big part of our work is finding out more about them! Watch this video to see our Head of Conservation and Research, Dr Campbell Murn, conducting field work as part of a project on Hooded Vultures in Southern Africa. In this region, the Hooded Vulture is an elusive species. It mainly occurs in protected areas and places where the human population density is low and there has been little research conducted on Hooded Vultures in southern Africa, which has limited our understanding of its ecology.
