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:
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.
We are extremely pleased to announce that Katie Harrington is the recipient of the first Marion Paviour Award. The purpose of this award is to further research into the conservation of birds of prey and support early-career researchers working towards this goal. We received a large number of high quality applications for the award, however Katie’s application impressed all the judges; her unique and interesting project, and obvious dedication made her stand out from the crowd.
Katie is a graduate student from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, USA and the Marion Paviour Award will help her to fund her Master’s thesis researching the Near-Threatened Striated Caracara (Phalcoboenus australis) in the Falkland Islands. For her research, Katie is using tail-mounted data loggers to collect high-resolution data of the caracara’s body movements which will allow her to calculate their daily activity budgets (how much time they are spending doing different activities during the day, for example how much time they spend moving or feeding), and use this to work out their daily energy use.
Katie is very grateful to the Hawk Conservancy Trust for the Marion Paviour Award which will help to fund her trip to the Falklands in February for an additional season of data collection, that will allow her to complete her graduate research and contribute information critical to the conservation management of this remarkable species.
Images: Katie Harrington
The Trust is currently hosting student Anika Preuss who is researching the effect of fitting data loggers to birds for the purpose of research.
Our Project Officer, Andre Botha, who is based in South Africa, found a White-backed Vulture dangerously entangled in a dead tree. Here is his account of what happened:
