3,500 Raptors later: A long-overdue update

It’s been a long time since I last updated this blog. Work, and especially my PhD, hasn’t exactly boosted my birding hours. As it turns out, turning your passion into your job changes the relationship a bit. At least, it did for me.

That said, I haven’t been standing still. Over the past years I’ve been building a growing collection of raptors-in-flight photos from multiple seasons at the Batumi Raptor Count. I’m still a few years behind on editing, but there are now nearly 3,500 aged and/or sexed raptors in flight available on my eBird/Macaulay Library. It’s become a collection I’m genuinely proud of, and if you’re a raptor fanatic like me, I hope you’ll enjoy browsing through them.

Recent leaps in camera autofocus have made it possible to capture perspectives that were hard to get before: upperwings, unusual angles, birds framed by the landscape. And with so much migration at eye level in Batumi, it’s been a joy to push that a bit further each season. The gallery now includes everything from dark-morph Marsh Harriers and overhead Booted Eagles to Honey Buzzards doing close station flybys and kettles of Steppe Buzzards sliding through the clouds in the bottleneck.

If you’d like to use high-resolution versions of any images, just send me the Macaulay Library link and I’ll gladly share them. One day I hope eBird will let us set a simple CC license and enable downloads, but until then, this works too.

And finally, if you happen to spot a misidentified bird somewhere in the archive… let me know. Corrections are always welcome, and if it’s a clear mistake, there may even be a beer waiting for you at the Green Café during the next BRC season.

Enjoy the photos!