The Amazing Journey

In September 2010, Nature Iraq undertook a combined monitoring and advocacy exercise in several areas of Iraq where Sociable Lapwings have been previously found on passage.

Here you can see a group of school children holding up posters that explain the rarity of the species and urge local communities to participate in their protection.

After an absence of any firm location data since early October, Erzhan – our most experienced traveller – has just popped up on our radar again. For the fourth year running we can confirm he is now back in a wintering flock in Sudan.

A new transmission just received from Dinara now locates her close to the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

A surprise transmission from Abaj on Thursday December 23rd alerted us that he was still alive, his transmitter was once again functioning and he was probably now wintering somewhere in the Middle East. Today we have just received the great news of a further transmission from Abaj that places him a few kilometres north of Al Qa’arah in the west of Saudi Arabia.

One of our tagged Sociable Lapwings has been tracked all the way from the breeding grounds in Kazakhstan to wintering grounds around the Great Rann of Kutch. Dinara, an adult female Sociable Lapwing tagged in May 2010 at Birlik in central Kazakhstan, was tracked spending at least ten days in the Indus valley in Pakistan [...]

‘The Amazing Journey’ project was designed primarily to improve our understanding of the migration routes that Critically Endangered Sociable Lapwings use so that conservation measures can be put in place. The data we are now obtaining is proving extremely interesting. For example Tatyana, an adult female Sociable Lapwing tagged in May 2010 at Kantarlau in [...]

Jamie Buchan has kindly sent us details of three Sociable Lapwings seen in Qatar on the 27th November, following on from the two sighted south-west of Doha on November 18th (again reported by Jamie). The three birds were seen at Arakhiya Farm, 30-kilometres south west of Doha, and were apparently associating with Northern Lapwings. The [...]

Two new eye-witness reports we have just received confirm Sociable Lapwings are now passing further south through the Middle East and have arrived in The Gulf.

After an absence of transmissions from our satellite tagged birds for several weeks, a new transmission just received from Dinara is very welcome news and marks another important milestone in our growing understanding of the complexity of Sociable Lapwing migration.

Two transmissions recorded on November 13th confirm Dinara has now arrived in central Pakistan, in the Indus floodplain not far from Shujaabad.

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.