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Dear collegues,

We study Honey Buzzards with GPS-dataloggers for three years now. It’s a cooperation between Willem Bouten (who developed the system) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and (Jan van Diermen and Willem van Manen for Boomtop foundation). The UvA focuses on migration whereas Boomtop is more interested in behaviour and habitat use in the breeding and wintering area. For details you can visit [link widoczny dla zalogowanych]

Up to now we provided 14 birds with the 19 g device and almost all returned the next year(s) to breed successfully. One retrapped bird showed no sign of injury after one year wearing it´s datalogger, so we assume that the birds do not suffer from the loggers.

Per bird we receive massive amounts of data (2-6 fixes/hour during daytime). At the moment the UvA works on a grant for a PhD-student (Wouter Vansteelant, one of the coordinators of the Batumi counts). He aims to study the relation between weather conditions and efficiency of HB migration and finally on breeding success. To increase the meteorological variability and variation in habitats and populations we want to extend our research further to the east. We plan to set up a second study area in Bialowieza Forest since one of us knows the area and studied Honey Buzzards there in 2003-06.

We are looking for a (PhD) student who helps us in finding and checking nests, catching and tagging birds, setting up and maintaining the receiving system.

In return the UvA:
- Supplies you of all material (several GPS-trackers, receivers, laptop for storage) free of charge;
- Will help to catch birds, attach the data loggers and set up the receiving system;
- Will postprocess the data and will give you access to the central database or provide you with the results in accessible format like Google-Earth-kml,or textfile.

If you are interested, give us a sign and we will contact you to further discuss the cooperation and to provide you with more details on the GPS tracking system. The data would be joint property and publications would have bilateral co-authors. We are sure that the data set has plenty of opportunities for several PhD students.

Greetings,
Willem van Manen [link widoczny dla zalogowanych]
Willem Bouten [link widoczny dla zalogowanych]