It’s World Migratory Bird Day today. This is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats. It has a global outreach and is an effective tool to help raise global awareness of the threats faced by migratory birds, their ecological importance, and the need for international cooperation to conserve them.

CCI’s Collaborative Fund facilitates projects that support collaboration for conservation including of migratory birds. The decline in long-distance migrant landbird populations is an important, growing conservation concern. This has prompted much new targeted research but an overview and gap analysis was lacking. A  recently completed CCI Collaborative Fund project: Science and Policy to Address Threats to the Afro-Palearctic Migratory Birds: new research and future policy brought together science and policy experts to review recent advances and identify future science, policy and practice priorities at the flyway scale.

For many birdwatchers, the spring migration period is the most exciting time of the year. It is a time of change, with the departure of winter visitors and arrival of summer migrants.  BTO have lots of information about spring migrants here including about BirdTrack – project partners include BTO, RSPB and BirdLife International.

One of our most familiar migrants, swifts, have been having a hard time, partly due to a reduction in nest sites. The RSPB want your records of swift nest sites or screaming swifts- you can record them here.

We hope the swifts will return to use the boxes in the East Tower of the David Attenborough Building.