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Category Archives: Education

Black 17 back in the UK

Posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2013 by Andrew Taylor

In November last year Black 17, a two year old female bustard, became the first adult bustard from the project to migrate to France. She wintered with a flock of several hundred cranes on the west coast of France, near La Rochelle, and had not been reported since 27th February. Not surprisingly, we were very excited [...]

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Bustards on the One Show

Posted on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 by Alex Stott

The Great Bustard Group will be on the One Show on BBC1 tomorrow at 7pm. Please tune in.

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Bustards looking their best

Posted on Friday, March 15th, 2013 by Andrew Taylor

Several displaying male bustards are currently a daily sight at our release site. The most impressive of these is Purple 5, the oldest male great bustard living in the wild in the UK. Dave Kjaer has recently taken this superb series of photographs of P5 looking his absolute best. Visits to the project through March and April are [...]

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Helping bustards in the snow

Posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2013 by Andrew Taylor

As birds which live and feed on the ground, deep snow can be a serious problem for great bustards. We are lucky that in southern England, cold snaps tend to be short and far apart. In countries like Germany, Hungary and Austria, bustards often make cold weather movements, escaping from particularly severe winter weather. This exposes them to [...]

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Bird poo study to help great bustards thrive

Posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 by Andrew Taylor

Move over Gillan McKeith – scientists at the University of Bath are studying the droppings of great bustards to help understand their diet and nutrition with the aim of boosting their survival in a conservation project to reintroduce the birds to the UK. Great bustards, the world’s largest flying bird and the county mascot for [...]

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Mongolian Bustard Fundraising initiative launched

Posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 by Alex Stott

Screenshot of Mongolian Bustard fundraising website

The Asian Great Bustard project http://www.asiangreatbustard.org/ has launched a fund-raising initiative (http://www.rockethub.com/projects/10600-mongolian-myth-bustards) to cover the costs of field research, the final year of tuition for our team’s second master’s student, G. Natsag and radio transmitter time for Great Bustards which already have transmitters. They aim to raise $3,230 by the 17th of January next year. [...]

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Channel-hopping bustards

Posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2012 by Andrew Taylor

We are doing everything we can to discourage released great bustards from moving south in winter, as they do in the Russian source population, because it does not help their survival chances. They are released in areas of ideal habitat, with ample natural food. This year we have provided supplementary food using our ‘bustard’ rearing [...]

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