Guest blog by Keramat Hafezi Birgani The Siberian Crane is a critically endangered species of birds. There used to be three populations, of which the ‘central’ population was already extinct by 2002. Omid (in Persian “hope”) is...
Guest blog by Ahmed Saeed Suleiman On Yemen’s island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean we have held events to celebrate our Egyptian Vultures and other birds of prey for several years. This...
Guest blog by Abraham Shokouhi In the first guest blog about our Common Swift Apus apus Conservation Project in Iran in 2020 I mentioned that our work is greatly assisted by citizen science. We aim to continue...
Guest blog by Lyse Mauvais In April 2023, I travelled to northeast Syria to meet falcon hunters and traders, a little over a year after publishing my first piece on falcon trafficking in Syria. I’m no ornithologist, but as a...
Guest blog by Basma Sheta I am really pleased to write this account of a training programme in the basic techniques of bird monitoring that was undertaken at Lake Manzala, Egypt in autumn 2022 and funded by...
Guest blog by Robin Snape In October 2022, KUŞKOR was granted £1,500 by OSME’s Youth Development Fund, to organise and implement a second Autumn Bird Camp on Cyprus in partnership with BirdLife Cyprus. Seventeen young people from...
Guest blog by Gregory Askew The Graceful Prinia (Prinia gracilis) is a small, brownish, long-tailed warbler of damp habits in otherwise arid environments, including in and around anthropogenic sites. Where it occurs, it’s often quite abundant—nigh ubiquitous....
Guest blog by Korsh Ararat Iraq’s geographical location connects three continents: Africa, Europe, and Asia making it an important area for both resident and migratory bird species. There are approximately 412 bird species in Iraq, of which 19 are globally...
Guest blog by Guy Shorrock An opinion piece on illegal bird killing in Cyprus by Guy Shorrock, a former UK police officer and a wildlife crime investigator for the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK). Unsurprisingly, the hunting...
Guest blog by: Ali Yahya Mahrous and Nasser Abdulrahman Ahmed of the Socotra Wildlife Association Under the auspices of the Socotra Governor, the Socotra Wildlife Association celebrated International Vulture Awareness Day in September 2022. This was in...
Guest blog by Azzam Alwash Nature Iraq began as EDEN AGAIN, a project that focused the world’s attention on the drying of the marshes of southern Iraq. Our work was focused on informing the world that the...
Guest blog by Killian Mullarney and Oscar Campbell Introduction The OSME region is not short of bird species that present those of us who like an identification challenge with something to get our teeth into, ranging from...
Guest blog by Keramat Hafezi Birgani In my previous blog, I wrote about diverse habitats in southwestern Iran making it a hotspot of biodiversity in the Middle East. Since then, my friends and I in the Khuzestan...
Guest blog by Steffen Oppel Over the past years a lot of effort has been invested to protect migratory raptors along the eastern Mediterranean flyway – but are those efforts yielding results? Breeding territories of Egyptian Vultures...