Lesvos bird news service potential. (1 Viewer)

During a holiday recently on Lesvos, one thing struck me was the enormous potential for Birdguides, RBA or any bird news service provider to do themselves and birders a lot of good.

The number of birders on the island was staggering, almost more than you see on Scilly in October.

Bird news were written into the log books in the Kalloni and Pasiphae hotels by a few faithful birders working with the motto that if you feed the system with info then you get it back from others.

Log books are fine but finding out about some birds at the end of the day was slightly annoying. This also only serves Kalloni birders best and left out birders at other resorts. I suspect a more up to date system would be more workable such as a text alert service from one of the bird news suppliers if they were willing to provide such a service for say April/May and September if demand is enough.

I reckon birders would be more generous with their news if they knew it would be immediately distributed unless they did not want their peace disturbed wherever they were. If birders based away from Kalloni could keep in touch with the grapevine by a text news service then they would not need to come to Kalloni just to check the books and go elsewhere thus ensuring a greater even distribution/coverage which benefits all birders on the island.

The point of this thread is to make this known to bird news suppliers and see what other forum users think of this idea so they can see if there is a demand.

This is something I thought of last year and mentioned to Birdguides ahead of this spring. They liked the idea and said that widening their bird news extra service to other areas is a possibility in the future if the demand was there.

As Andrew says, Lesvos attracts quite large nubmers of birders in the key spring weeks, there was probably up to 400+ UK birders there the week Andrew was there, and news exchange remains one of the main issues. Two hotels have bird logs (Pasiphae and Kalloni II) and have had for many years, but with increased effort this year, and in particular the dailly summaries I was posting on lesvosbirding.com, the Pasiphae bird log got through more pages this spring than in the last five years put together! We also had more birders than ever coming down to the Pasiphae in the evenings to have a drink and exchange news which was great. We hope to build on this next year.

In the meantime, lesvosbirding.com will continue to cover the island as thoroughly as possible, but is of course dependant on others sending me their news for posting.