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Birdlife Conservation

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Birdlife Israel (formerly the Israel Ornithological Center) began with a project to protect an eagle nest in the 1970s, and since then, has worked on field research and study, to protect the diversity of birds in Israel. The main work of the center is protecting endangered species and the habitats important for their survival. Time after time, we set out on public campaigns for the birds, and together with you, we have achieved many successes.

In 2020, we entered the tenth year of Keren Duchifat (Hoopoe Foundation), and this gives us another opportunity to thank Racheli and Moshe Yanai, the donors who established Keren Duchifat, and Mark Gelfand and other donors, without whom we wouldn’t have sustained our efforts and succeeded in over 40 projects promoting birding in Israel.

The research aspect of nature conservation was strengthened last year through a vision shared by the Hoopoe Foundation, SPNI, and the Hebrew University.

This year we commemorated 40 years since the establishment of our birding centers. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the 41st birding symposium that was to be held during Chanukah was cancelled; in its place we held ten lectures through Zoom. On five nights, a festive menorah-lighting ceremony took place, along with a 10-minute discussion and question-and-answer sessions with two lecturers each evening. Likewise, walking tours took place at five birding sites around the country, with the participation of 1,400 hikers. These events were very successful, and we thank the public participants in our annual symposia – the annual Birding Symposium during Chanukah and the annual “Eagles in the Sky” symposium held in collaboration with the Air Force – for following our COVID-19-adapted activities and taking part in them.

In the educational sphere, the educational activity “Ken L’Tzippor” has been running for ten years and remains very successful. The activity includes 95 schools, half of which are in the Arab and Druze sectors, and 450 science and technology schools.

The barn owl project has reached a milestone of 5,000 breeding boxes for barn owls in Israel. The project has also spread across borders, into Greece and Cyprus.

The live cam project serves as a unique public-research activity to engage the general public in Israel and around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic doubled our audience in this case: we had 6 million site visitors in 2019, which increased to 12 million visitors in 2020. The birds most watched were the short-toed eagle, long-legged buzzard, griffon vulture, Egyptian vulture, and barn owl. This project is an example of successful collaboration of SPNI with the INPA and IDF.

This year we also added a prize of appreciation for diligence, offered by Yossi Kfir, to encourage birders with no academic background, and a prize (named after Amit Gefen z”l) for exceptional young adults who contribute to birding.

Thanks to a donation from Toronto, Canada, two clusters of fish ponds at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin and Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael are being rehabilitated into sites for birding and bird habitat development, as a ground-breaking project. The effort to rehabilitate these habitats and integrate public and educational activity within them will continue during 2021.

This year we also ran a series of birding lectures though Zoom, with hundreds of listeners attending each lecture.

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