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.
Each year, the training schedule of all new birds is divided among the Bird Team. To get the most out of each bird, we know from experience that it is best to have a one or two people assigned to each bird, at least initially, to build confidence. This summer, Kat Ralph has been working with a young Black Kite and we’ve been catching up with her to find out more about what this process involves:
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:
It is with much sadness that we have to tell you that Frodo, our Tawny Eagle, has passed away at the grand age of 35, as a result of old age.
We were delighted to be presented with the Gold award for Small Visitor Attraction of the Year at last night’s Beautiful South tourism awards ceremony!
Winter can be a tough time of year for wild birds of prey, particularly young birds facing their first winter. We’ve been catching up with Cedric Robert, our National Bird of Prey HospitalTM Manager, to find out more about some of the most recent patients: “November has been an eventful month for me in the hospital, so I am going to give you an insight to just one week last month. We started the week with only one indoor bay available inside the hospital and all outdoor rehabilitation aviaries were full. I was very eager to be back to work […]
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.
To celebrate International Vulture Awareness Day 2018, we invited you to take part in our Literary Competition.
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 […]
We’re often asked about breeding birds of prey, so we’ve been catching up with Mike Riley (a senior member of our Bird Team) to find out more about incubation: Incubation is the artificial brooding and rearing of eggs and is sometimes used over natural incubation for a number of reasons: In the case of endangered species, you can sometimes encourage the parent birds to have a second clutch of eggs if you take the first clutch for incubation. If successful, this method increases the total number of chicks for the year. This can sometimes happen in the wild if something has […]
