The Amazing Journey

In addition to providing important new sightings records, Birders’ contributions to The Amazing Journey website are also providing extremely valuable information about Sociable Lapwing behaviour and habitat association. These are an important aid to conservation planning.

Further to our recent request for sightings we have received details from Surat Singh Poonia of four Sociable Lapwings he encountered and photographed in the Tal Chhapar WildLife Sanctuary in Rajasthan last Sunday – October 24th.

On October 10th, 554 Sociable Lapwings were located in central eastern Turkey – the largest flock of migrating Sociable Lapwings encountered so far this autumn marking the discovery of an important new staging site.

Watch this extraordinary video of Dr. Rob Sheldon and Maxim Koshkin fitting one of the new satellite tracking devices to Alia in June 2010.

The Sociable Lapwing Project has been running since 2004, the year the Sociable Lapwing was uplisted to the category “Critically Endangered” on the basis of severe population declines. Each year since then, researchers have collected data on numbers, habitat use, distribution and nesting success on the breeding grounds in Kazakhstan.

Maxim Koskin is the Sociable Lapwing Conservation Project Leader at ACBK.

Dr Paul Donald is the Principal Conservation Scientist in RSPB’s International Research Team.

Jim Lawrence is Development Manager of the BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme.

Martin is a BirdLife Communications Officer and managing Editor of this blog. All mistakes can be attributed to him, even if he didn’t write them.

Andreas Pittl is the Head of Marketing:Nature at Swarovski Optik.