{"id":3795,"date":"2016-12-25T10:11:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T10:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/?p=3795"},"modified":"2025-01-14T19:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T18:00:10","slug":"christmas-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/christmas-present\/","title":{"rendered":"A wonderful Christmas gift!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SwissDecember and January is a great time to\u00a0escape the northern winter and look for Ospreys further south, so we decided to spend the Christmas holidays in Senegal and more precisely, see if any of our released birds had decided to winter there. Arriving to the Langue de Barbarie National Park near Saint Louis (a very important place for wintering Ospreys) on December 22, we met John Wright from the Rutland Osprey Project <\/a>in the UK, who with Spanish ornithologists Rafa Benjumea and Blanca Perez of the Tougoupeul Project had just spent a month here working with National Park staff on bird monitoring. December 22 was their last day before heading off to other sites.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0a wonderful\u00a0Christmas gift, John proudly gave us this photo of a young male Osprey that he had taken\u00a0that morning. Amazingly, one of our birds released\u00a0in Switzerland\u00a0this summer! The photo clearly shows a blue ring on the bird\u2019s right leg, as well as the antenna of the VHF radio transmitter still attached to\u00a0its tail (that will fall off once the\u00a0moult finishes in a few months\u2019 time). Although the ring number can\u2019t be read, we suspect that it\u00a0could be\u00a0either PS0 (Ivan) or PS1 (Masqu\u00e9).\u00a0So we have\u00a0proof that at least one of our young made it to West Africa and is happily eating the abundant fish at the Langue de Barbarie.<\/p>\n

We spent three more days\u00a0in the National Park looking for him, unfortunately\u00a0to no avail, but saw over 60 other Ospreys including one with a black ring from Germany that we could read. Later we travelled to La Somone (south of Dakar) where we saw many more Ospreys including\u00a0a French adult bird with an orange ring, and another German bird.<\/p>\n

Many protected areas and other wetlands in Africa are essential in providing safe and quiet places for wintering birds such as Ospreys. Pressures of all kinds are often increasing in these very unique places and a great deal of engagement and public awareness is needed\u00a0to guarantee their long term safety. To all who manage and protect them we send our greatest thanks and wish them a happy New Year!<\/p>\n

\"Osprey
A happy group. From\u00a0left to right: Rafa Benjumea, Moussa Fall (Conservateur of the Langue de Barbarie National Park), Blanca Perez, Issa Sylla (former Senegal National Parks Director) and John Wright.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December and January is a great time to\u00a0escape the northern winter and look for Ospreys further south, so we decided to spend the Christmas holidays in Senegal and more precisely, see if any of our released birds had decided to winter there. Arriving to the Langue de Barbarie National Park near Saint Louis (a very … Continue reading A wonderful Christmas gift!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5MO3H-Zd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balbuzards.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}