OSME

Although OSME does not (yet) have a presence on Instagram, mainly due to limited capacity as a small volunteer-based council, many of our partners, collaborators and funding recipients do! You can find many of them there, with many being more active on that platform than on Facebook. Our very active partners in Central Asia are there, as are Birding Azerbaijan, the raptor counts at Galala, Batumi, Galugah, our Corporate Partners in the birding tour business such as Birding Ecotours, Rubythroat and Oriole Birding. And of course many active birders and conservationists of the

You instagrammers - feel very free to talk about you find useful, and to link people to our FB and web. Until we have sorted our own IG presence 🙂

Attached is an example from the very active and attractive IG account of Kyrgyz conservation group Nature Foundation.

OSME cheers for and encourages you to vote for the Egyptian Vulture New LIFE project as finalist in one of the most prestigious awards for nature and biodiversity in Europe - the European Commission LIFE Awards!

The project is competing with two other finalists in the “Nature and Biodiversity” category, as well as with eight projects for the prestigious Citizens’ Prize, which is decided through public voting.

Check out this web page and cast your vote for the Egyptian Vulture, one of the flagship raptors of the OSME region!

Egyptian Vulture New LIFE – LIFE Awards 2026 The Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), Europe’s only long-distance migratory vulture, has suffered a dramatic decline due to poisoning, electrocution, persecution, and habitat loss. While most European pairs are concentrated in Spain, small and fragile populations in the Balkans are critica...

Birds of the World platform is freely accessible for people living in the !

OSME launched a partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2025 to make Birds of the World, a global ornithology platform, free and open for anyone living within the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia. That calls for some cheers, again! Go there, create your profile and join this world of bird knowledge.

"Scholarly information on the birds of the OSME region is more accessible than ever thanks to Birds of the World (birdsoftheworld.org), a scholarly online platform featuring authoritative, in-depth species profiles that document the life histories of every bird species and every bird family in the world.

It is a highly upgraded fusion of four predecessor publications: Handbook of Birds of the World Alive, Birds of North America, Neotropical Birds, and Bird Families of the World, with new scholarly content being added every week. This massive resource is published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (the Cornell Lab), a non-profit bird conservation organization based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. Having once been a fee-based subscription, the resource is now freely available throughout the OSME region to anyone with a Cornell Lab/eBird account."

Read the full news post here:

https://osme.org/2026/04/birds-of-the-world-platform-now-freely-accessible-in-the-osme-region/

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