RU EN
Close

School-level birding competitions will be held in 5 Russian regions

21 september 2022

The first weekend of October will see a traditional Eurasian Bird Count, a grass-root bird monitoring event used to track birds during the fall migratory season, take place. This is an opportunity to draw our mainland residents’ attention to the problems that migratory birds face. With the support of SIBUR, Birds and People, a non-profit partnership, will hold school-level birding competitions across the Republic of Bashkortostan, Amur, Nizhegorodskaya, Tomsk and Tyumen Oblasts in the course of these several days. 

A key task of the Environmental Protection focus area of our Formula for Good Deeds program is to educate the residents of the regions where SIBUR has a presence by way of popularizing civil science. That is why we have expanded the geography of these school birding competitions held during the Eurasian Bird Count to cover a total of five regions. I am sure that the participants will appreciate this format of interacting with the nature, Elena Snezhko, manager and head of the Formula for Good Deeds social investment program, noted.

The objective of the participants in the school competition is to count migratory birds they sighted over the weekend and record the results using a questionnaire form on a dedicated
website. The results of the count will then be forwarded to ornithologists who will assess autumn bird migration patterns in the area covered by the study.

Thanks to SIBUR, our bird-fanciers' movement is constantly growing, and the regions where school-level birding competitions are held are consistently ranked among the leaders. Being the Russian record-keeping coordinator, we view this event as not only an entertaining competition for children and adults, but also a tool used to assist professional ornithologists in gaining a better understanding of the patterns of autumn bird migration in our country thanks to the data thus acquired, Yulia Gorelova, director of the Birds and People non-profit partnership and expert of the Territory of the Lapwing project, commented.