A new Flyway Monitoring Traineeship at Batumi in collaboration with OSME
Over the past decade, migration monitoring has become more and more popular along the East Afro-Eurasian Flyway, with projects (re)starting across the OSME region in the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia. Simultaneously, these projects regularly get approached by ambitious people from across the flyway who are interested in learning, to gain knowledge about migratory bird monitoring to bring for useback home. OSME has learned that building people and capacity is just as critical as the actual birds, and our Youth Development Fund has since its inauguration 2019 supported lots of such initiatives. What better place than Batumi Raptor Count to act as platform and host for such training. In the past decade, BRC has been fortunate to host (aspiring) migration count leaders from around the world, who have gone on to start or reinforce successful bird monitoring initiatives in their home countries. OSME and BRC now deepens an already longstanding and successful partnership and excitedly presents this new traineeship program! We are now able to further strengthen this kind of capacity building along the flyway.
This new initiative, starting autumn 2024, offers traineeship positions to ambitious high potentials from the OSME region who are dedicated to bring learned and experienced monitoring and conservation principles back to their home countries. Funded by OSME, Batumi Raptor Count can host a total of 2 traineeship positions for a period of at least 1 month each every autumn.
We are very proud to already welcome the first two trainees!
Alyona Kaptyonkina from Kazakhstan and Mitra Daneshvar from Iran will join the counts this autumn. Follow our social media platforms to read more about their experience as the first Flyway Monitoring trainees.
What the traineeship entails
Trainees will join the Batumi Raptor Count for at least a full month and their accommodation and travel costs will be fully reimbursed by OSME’s Youth Development Fund, up to €1300 combined. Given the highly standardised nature of the counts, trainees should primarily expect to be long-term counters as this will naturally expose them to many of the aspects involved in standardised monitoring: the count protocol, identification training and becoming a part of a team of international volunteers. However, on top of that, trainees will be involved in organisational aspects as well, which concerns using the Trektellen platform, data checking and cleaning, off- and online public outreach, organising evening activities and other social events, communicating with the host families, and interacting with tourists present. As a trainee, you’ll have the option of participating in education activities (e.g. school visits) and other research and conservation activities if these are taking place during your stay. However, in the end the Batumi Raptor Count first and foremost organises raptor counts, so all activities are influenced to a degree by the raptor migration dynamics in the period of participation.
The learn more about the expectations on the trainees, how to apply for autumn 2025 and onwards, see the BRC web at www.batumiraptorcount.org
