Last month we were thrilled that BlueGreen Labs was formally listed as one of the projects in the Pairi Daiza Foundation Conservation report through their support in biologging of swifts in both Belgian and Portuguese colonies. The Foundation sponsored geologgers were fitted by Lyndon and Portuguese colleagues last summer and retrieved this year.
Also, this week a couple of juvenile swifts (Apus apus) took to the wing from their nest boxes in Melsele.
This year Lyndon continued a long standing collaboration with Chinese partners in Beijing, teaching a workshop at the Belgian embassy on how to fit loggers. This was a project by the Belgium-China cooperation with support from long-term swift enthousiast and current Belgian ambassador to China, Bruno Angelet. Thanks go out to Terry Townshend providing critical local knowledge and Martine Wauters, founder of Swifts Without Frontiers and creator of World Swift Day, for putting swift conservation on the map.
Yesterday (2025-04-25) evening around 21:30h we got confirmation of the first swift arrival at the colony in Melsele. This good news got even better when we noticed that this is one of several swifts monitored with high-tech PathTrack GPS loggers.
Noteworthy is that Lyndon‘s swift tracking program received a video monitoring upgrade this winter with the support of the city of Beveren/Melsele and Regionale Landschappen Schelde-Durme. This system is similar to the colony in Ghent.
Ringing chicks in the Sint-Niklaas bell tower
Providing updated nesting space for swifts
Swifts optimize their flight behaviour to adapt to favourable night-time light conditions, driven by light-responsive and size-dependent vertical insect stratification and weather conditions.
swifts optimise their flight behaviour to adapt to favourable night-time light conditions
In recognition of a life-long career in amateur ornithology