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.
BlueGreen Labs was happy to co-author and support a research paper on Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of tabulated data led by Bas Vercruysse (Vercruysse et al. 2025) and the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Ghent. This work addresses the many issues with processing large volumes of historical tabulated data with some potential workflows. In particular, the work shows that due to the law of large numbers the variability of multi-author records (handwritten styles) compounded by the variability of layouts this work is not yet feasible in an fully automated fashion.
Ringing chicks in the Sint-Niklaas bell tower
Providing updated nesting space for swifts
Read and search access to historical research resources
In recognition of a life-long career in amateur ornithology
BlueGreen Labs closes the COBECORE project