The French Minister of Ecology, Nicolas Hulot has committed to ending the large-scale trapping of Ortolan Bunting, which takes place to meet demand for a cruel dish where the songbird is blinded, plumpened and drowned in brandy. It's a practice that has driven population declines of up to 84% in Europe since 1980.

Did you know that BirdLife Cyprus has been monitoring the common breeding birds of Cyprus for more than a decade? Birds are sentinels for change in the environment, like the canary in the coal mine, so keeping track of how they are doing is the foundation for monitoring the health of our countryside and for conserving our nature. None of this would have been possible without our team of committed citizen scientists.

On Friday 12 May 2017, BirdLife Cyprus volunteers and staff, together with the Game and Fauna Service, carried out the annual spring census of the Griffon Vulture. The team of 20 observers covered eight look-out points spread across the vulture feeding range and known breeding and roosting cliffs, while the Game and Fauna Service set up cameras at the vulture feeding stations.

Birds, as other wildlife, depend upon the delicate balance of ecosystems for their survival. Restoring, protecting and properly managing habitats is key to the preservation of biodiversity. Akrotiri Marsh, a unique wetland within the Cyprus SBAs, is home to many bird and plant species, and has benefited from targeted conservation actions for the last 2 years thanks to a project funded by the Darwin Initiative.
 

At the end of 2016, the second and final volume of the landmark Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World by the Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) and BirdLife International was published. This ground-breaking new checklist presents for the first time independent taxonomic revisions for all the bird species of the world, incorporating the most up-to-date information and an exhaustive methodology in an entirely systematic and consistent way. The new taxonomy has been full adopted by BirdLife Cyprus, replacing the now outdated classification system we had been using until recently.

The European Roller is an iconic species of European farmland. This summer visitor suffered large declines in the past in its breeding grounds in southern and eastern Europe and has already gone extinct in several central European countries. The main causes of decline are habitat degradation, due to intensification of agriculture and abandonment of traditional agricultural practices, loss of nest sites and high levels of persecution during migration.