[Dora Querido continues with her review of work in Bulgaria – and I don't envy her early start!]
Even for the best of the reasons waking up at 4am can never be a good experience! At least Stoyan (Project Manager of the Egyptian Vulture LIFE project) had amazing news to lift my mood: the vulture pair that is being monitored by video had laid an egg!
BSPB
The hideously early start to our day was due to an almost 5 hour journey to Skopje in Macedonia (south-west of Sofia) using A roads that make some B roads in the UK look like motorways! In order to understand the Balkan population overall, BSPB and the RSPB wants to support the continuation of the breeding surveys of Egyptian vultures in Macedonia that have been carried out by the Macedonian Ecology Society (MES) for the last 8 years. It would be a real loss to have a gap in these data as the survey contributes to a better understanding of the whole Balkan population. The negotiations with Stoyan and the MES Director Metodija Velevski (who everyone knows as Meto) were very effective, so we will invest in the simultaneous Macedonian study alongside the work in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Sadly, it wasn’t possible to find researchers in Albania this year to complete the picture, but that is something for next year
Watch this space for access to the Egyptian vulture video images in the near future.
Dora Querido / RSPB
Culture shock: all over the Macedonia countryside people build massive detached houses using bricks, but they rarely seem finished - perhaps building a house is a lifetime project and credit is not so easily to access?