A Quarter of a Million Raptors: Inside the Batumi Bottleneck
On 27 August 2026, two counting stations on a hillside in Adjara, Georgia, recorded nearly 19,300 birds of prey in a single day — the first day of the season to pass ten thousand. The birds were almost all European Honey Buzzards, and they came through for hours, stream after stream of them, following a coastline that narrows into one of the great migration funnels of the world.
Why here
Raptors dislike long water crossings. Coming south from Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic, they follow the eastern shore of the Black Sea rather than cutting across it, and the Lesser Caucasus mountains push them further towards the water. In Adjara, north of Batumi, sea and mountains pinch the route into a corridor only a few kilometres wide. Everything that wants to get from the western Palearctic to Africa without a long sea crossing has to squeeze through it.
That geography produces numbers on a scale that feels implausible until you stand there. Batumi Raptor Count has been counting the corridor since 2008; the autumn season runs from 12 August to 21 October, and every year since 2012 the season total has passed one million birds, with the single exception of 2024. In 2025 the project recorded 1.5 million in a season for the first time, breaking its own record of 1,422,172. The all-time single-day record, set on 2 October 2014, stands at 264,891 raptors — the largest passage of birds of prey ever recorded outside the Americas.
The 2026 season so far
The first fortnight was quiet: rain and fog pinned the birds down, and the counters began to wonder where the honey buzzards were. They arrived on 27 August. By early September the season total had reached 250,000 birds, ahead of the average of 231,778 for that date.
The composition, though, is odd. Honey buzzards made up 98% of everything counted — in an average year only about 89% of the birds counted by this point are honey buzzards. Black Kites are running around 80% below average and Marsh Harriers about 78% below, while Booted Eagles are closer to expectation, down roughly 25%. Nobody yet knows why the medium-sized raptors are so scarce; the counts only tell you that they are.
There was also a small, pleasing bonus. Batumi is the only place in the Western Palearctic where Crested Honey Buzzards are reliably seen on migration — the eastern form of the species, sometimes treated as a separate one — and the 2026 season had produced 54 of them by early September, nearly twice the long-term average of 28.
How to count a million birds
The count is standardised: fixed stations, fixed hours, the same protocol since 2008, with records filed to the open Trektellen platform and totals corrected for double counting. Volunteers pay to take part, are trained in identification, and spend weeks watching a single hillside sky. That discipline is the point. A funnel that delivers tens of thousands of birds in a day can also deliver a year of data that is comparable with every year before it — which is the only way anyone can say with confidence that this year's Black Kites are 80% down.
The project has expanded into the spring as well: a paper published in Ardea in March 2026 set out 17 years of counting to establish the eastern Black Sea coast as a principal raptor flyway in both seasons, not just the autumn one.
Why a count is worth doing
Single-day spectacles are easy to come by in a bottleneck; comparable data is not. Because the Batumi counts are standardised and published openly on Trektellen, they can be used to ask questions that no snapshot can answer: whether honey buzzard numbers are stable, whether the seasonal spread of Steppe Buzzard passage is shifting, whether the years when kites fail to appear are random or part of a trend. Long-lived, slow-breeding raptors decline quietly, and a funnel like this is one of the few places where a change in a population that winters thousands of kilometres away becomes visible in a single autumn's counts.
Going
The count runs from 12 August to 21 October each year, with the two main observation stations at Sakhalvasho and Shuamta in the hills above the coast. Honey buzzards peak from late August through the first half of September; October belongs to Steppe Buzzards, which arrive in the enormous, loose flocks that produced the record days. Visitors are welcome, and so are volunteers for the following season — the project takes beginners and teaches them.
Listening to the bottleneck
Raptors are not a group most people associate with sound, but the two headline species of the Batumi flyway are surprisingly vocal in the air: honey buzzards call in a plaintive, whistled fluting as they stream over a ridge, and kites keep up a thin, descending mewing that is often the first thing you hear before a stream comes into view.