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European Honey-buzzards Dominated Batumi’s Early Count as the Raw Total Passed 500,000

Juvenile European honey-buzzard in flight
Conservation · Population & status

Batumi Raptor Count passed 500,000 raw raptor detections on 3 September 2026 after three consecutive days with more than 90,000 birds. European honey-buzzards (Pernis apivorus) dominated this early-season surge through the Batumi bottleneck in Georgia, where migrating raptors become concentrated along the eastern Black Sea coast between the sea and the mountains.

Two days earlier, when the raw seasonal total passed 250,000, honey-buzzards made up 98% of all raptors recorded so far. Batumi Raptor Count compared this with an average of 89% by the same date in 2017–2025. Black kites and western marsh harriers were unusually scarce at that stage of the season, while honey-buzzard passage appeared to be broadly on schedule.

By 3 September, the three successive 90,000-plus days had carried the running total beyond half a million. Batumi Raptor Count noted that only 2012, 2015 and 2019 had previously reached that milestone as early as 3 September.

The figure is a live migration count, not a final annual total or population estimate. Birds can be recorded from both count stations, so Batumi Raptor Count later processes the data to correct for possible double counts and observations outside the standardised count periods. The early-season numbers therefore describe the scale and composition of the migration passage at that point in 2026, not a finished estimate of the population.

Sources and image credit

  1. Batumi Raptor Count. (2026, September 3). 500,000 birds counted!Primary field update. Three consecutive days above 90,000 raptors pushed the 2026 raw seasonal count past 500,000, with European honey-buzzards dominating the migration stream.
  2. Batumi Raptor Count. (2026, September 1). 250,000 birds counted!Primary field update reporting that European honey-buzzards made up 98% of the first 250,000 birds counted in 2026, compared with an average 89% by the same date in 2017–2025.
  3. Batumi Raptor Count. (n.d.). Migration count data. Retrieved September 13, 2026.Method and historical-count page. Ongoing daily and seasonal totals are raw and uncorrected for possible double counts between stations; standardised annual totals are processed later. The processed 2025 European honey-buzzard total was 561,311.

Image: Juvenile European honey-buzzard in flight in the Saint Petersburg region, Russia, 7 September 2022. Photo: Andrey Gulivanov / Wikimedia Commons / Flickr. CC BY 2.0. Representative migration-season image; not from the 2026 Batumi count. · CC BY 2.0 · Source

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