Yelkouan Shearwater Project Goes Beyond the Borders

This February, NatureGuides team visited us with the aim of filming Yelkouan activity in the Bosphorus and they produced a short film for the project team.

NatureGuides and Project Team

Max Whitby has been filming birds for almost 20 years and he has decided to use his remarkable archive for the mobile application of Collins Bird Guide. The application contains short videos for each species showing flight, behaviour and jizz. Max was complaining about the lack of high quality video of yelkouans in this collection and with his colleague Fiona Barclay, they decided to take a short trip to Istanbul for filming yelkouans after they found our project on the internet.

Max Whitby and Fiona Barclay Filming Yelkouans

After we met, they first informed us about their remarkable works and once again proved that these kind of studies require dedication and passion and giving its fruits in a very long time. We are impressed by their work and though we should impress them too thus we bring them to Rumeli Hisarı. It was enough for them to see our regular count point to appreciate the Bosphorus.

Despite the truth that Yelkouan is one of the most coastal birds in Procellariidae family there isn’t any spot other than the Turkish straits in the whole Basin at which you can easily observe these birds from the coast. Max and Fiona are impressed how easily you can spot such pelagic species in the middle of the city.

Max Whitby is on the go

 

We are pretty sure that the frames shot by Max is used in the best way in Collins Bird Guide application. But other than the app, they produced a short film (at the end of this blog) that summaries the importance of our project, is useful for identification of yelkouans and contains beautiful Istanbul views. Apparently, Bird Guides.com couldn’t resist long and published this short video immediately and shared it with their subscribers. These were the best gifts for our project.

We hope in the near future we count more and more yelkouans with an international team. Yelkouans and the Bosphorus need some awareness.