Ben Locke

We would like to express a huge thank you to everyone who attended our first meeting today. As promised, we will shortly be in contact with everyone who attended. In the meantime, this is just a brief message to say that the slides shown prior to the discussion are now available for download, giving better opportunity to study the maps and figures that were presented. Please see the documents page to download a copy.

Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group would like to remind everyone that it is our inaugural meeting on January 17th at St. Peter’s RC High School (Stroud Road, Tuffley). This meeting will start at 10am and tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided.

The meeting will be held in Pavilion at St. Peter’s. This is located at the bottom of site so when you arrive be sure to drive down past reception (bearing right) and follow the road to the bottom where there is plenty of parking. The Pavilion is the grey building in front of the tennis courts near the car park. Once you are there you will need to go upstairs.

If you can no longer attend, please let us know.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Hot on the heels of the launch of the Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group, we now have another new group dedicated to the monitoring of one special species – the much-loved Barn Owl. The Gloucestershire Barn Owl Monitoring Programme (GBOMP) comprises a number of the members of GRMG, along with Andy Lewis and Richard Harris. Today, the public face of GBOMP has been launched in the form of its new website, at www.glosbarnowls.co.uk. The group can also be found on Twitter (@glosbarnowls). The group is looking for volunteers and is keen to hear about your Barn Owl records.
NB. if you already submit Barn Owl records to GRMG, there is no need to duplicate them to GBOMP, though you are welcome to.

We are very grateful to Dave Pearce for providing us with two articles about the Peregrines of Christ Church, Cheltenham. The first gives a great insight in to the lives of the birds and their breeding patterns, from pre-laying activity to laying, hatching, feeding, first flights, and eventual dispersal of young. The second article details a day in the life of one month old Peregrine chicks. Please head to our documents page where you can download these and other documents.

Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group would like to wish everyone a very happy new year. We have been busy preparing for our first meeting, which takes place at St Peter’s RC High School, Gloucester, on January 17th. Full details can be found here. Please remember to let us know if you have an interest in attending. After a brief overview of why the group was formed, and what we hope it might be able to achieve, the meeting will be very much about us finding out what people want from the group, and how they can contribute.

Please do continue to send us your observations. We’re extremely grateful to those who have already been submitting their records.

The GRMG site now has a new and permanent domain name – glosraptors.co.uk. Please update your bookmarks, and remember that you can subscribe to the site using the form on the right hand side of the page (beneath the tweets). Some new photographs have also been added to the gallery, including this stunning capture of an adult female Peregine attacking an inverted Common Buzzard, photographed by Jon Watson at Symonds Yat Rock. Finally, we now have a links page with various local and national birding, surveying and conservation groups, with more to come.

We will be holding an event on January 17th, 2015 at St. Peter’s RC High School, Gloucester (GL4 0DD).

This event is an initial get together for those interested in contributing to GRMG. All details for this event can be found here – please email us on [email protected] to let us know you wish to attend.

At the time of writing, this website is still very much a work in progress. We hope that it will prove to be a useful resource not only for us as a monitoring group, but also for anyone with an interest in Gloucestershire’s raptors. We will strive to make available news, reports and useful information whenever we can, and we are welcoming of any contributions our visitors may wish to make. The most obvious way in which you can help to further the knowledge of the group is to submit all your raptor sightings. This will not only help us to build an accurate picture of the populations of species in the county, but will also contribute towards the protection of them and their habitats. In addition to your sightings, please feel free to get in touch with any news, thoughts or suggestions. Finally, if you have taken a photo that you’d like to share, or perhaps that you need help identifying, we’d love to see it, and maybe even add it to the gallery. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter!

We are thrilled and delighted that the one & only Helen Macdonald has agreed to be honorary president of our fledgling raptor group.

Helen is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir ‘H Is For Hawk‘, which follows her previous book ‘Falcon‘. It details the story of how she came to acquire and train Mabel, a goshawk, after being overwhelmed by sadness following the sudden death of her father in 2007.  The book has been widely accoladed and has now won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Claire Tomalin, chairman of the judges for the prize described ‘H Is For Hawk’ as

…a book unlike any other, about an obsession with a wild creature, brought to life in prose sometimes technical and always striking, and set in English landscapes observed with a visionary eye. Writing about wildlife and the environment has never been better or better informed than this.

We are extremely thankful for Helen’s support.