This year Toby Smith completed a 2 week expedition to Gabon and the incredible Bateke Plateau on a multi-tiered collaboration started from within the University of Cambridge. The project was joint funded and in conjunction with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Society for Wildlife Artists (SWLA) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) . The trip was completed, with Malcolm Green – an oral storyteller, to document the exact physical landscapes revealed by a unique study on satellite tagged Cuckoos completed by Dr Chris Hewson of the BTO.
With many migratory bird-populations in decline its important we increase our understanding of their wintering habitats. It was both amazing and challenging to photograph a specific area of Africa on an assignment dictated purely by the exact location of an endangered animal.
This photography project will also form one of the principal outputs of my Leverhulme Trust Residency at The University of Cambridge Conservation Institute.
We have lost over half the number of Cuckoos in the UK over the last 20 years..
Since 2011 the BTO have been satellite-tracking Cuckoos to find out why. They have learned vital information which could help us to understand our Cuckoos – about the routes they have taken, and some of the pressures they face whilst on migration.
When the BTO began their study, they had very little idea where these birds spent the winter or how they got there. Their latest research and a paper published in Nature Communications not only reveals this information, but also shows that the Cuckoos’ use of autumn migration routes helps explain population declines. The live progress of this year’s study birds can be monitored via the BTO’s web page.
A male cuckoo, named Patch, had journeyed from here, in East Anglia, to Gabon on a 3200km migratory odyssey that included crossing the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara Desert. I spent a number of months scrutinising the BTO’s historic satellite data and planning an expedition to 3 remote areas. Patch’s exact destination had dictated the exact locations that I would visit and photograph.
Links:
tobysmith.com/project/chasing-cuckoos/
bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking
nature.com/ncomms/2016/160719/ncomms12296/full/ncomms12296.html
research-institute.conservation.cam.ac.uk/about
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