A Rocha of Arles, France
In the heat of July in a rural region of Arles, France, a team of A Rocha bird conservationists tread past pastures of bulls raised for the arena and through fields of sunflowers.
The conservationists walk toward one of their small nest boxes in order to ring a group of adolescent European rollers as part of their ongoing study.
A Rocha is an international Christian organization working on nature preservation and environmental education. Within Arles, A Rocha is working on a project focused on the study of the European roller, a stocky blue and brown bird that has experienced decreasing populations throughout the region.
Timothée Schwartz climbs into a tree to retrieve motion sensor cameras. These cameras are used in order to track tags of the birds who migrate to the nesting boxes designed by A Rocha researchers.
A Rocha is actively working in more than 20 countries around the world, preserving the environment with the motivation of Christian ideals and the hard work of conservationists who come from all different cultures. The prevalence of Christian ideals changes the mindset of conservation workers with A Rocha.
(Left to right) Emily Walker, Gábor Vágner, and Timothée Schwartz review footage from the motion sensor camera previously mounted on a bird box. After three days, there were 45,000 photos to go through from a single camera.
Timothée Schwartz measures a roller’s leg, from thigh to foot, to track the growth of the bird, which is registered into the A Rocha database.
Schwartz focuses primarily on the European roller at the Mas Mireille center. The rollers are classified as sit-and-wait-hunters. The parents hunt by sitting atop tall perches such as trees or telephone poles, looking for insects or small lizards to swoop down on before returning to their nests to feed their babies. After hatching, the roller takes on average 30 days to fledge, and then leaves the nest.
Izabela Kujawiak, front, and Gaëtan Ganivet, back, input data from the new museum tags put on European Rollers into the A Rocha servers.
(Left to right) Gábor Vágner, Emily Walker, Sarah Marc, Timothée Schwartz and other volunteers pray before eating lunch together. Each day a different volunteer of A Rocha makes a meal from their home country to share with the others.
Emily Walker, left, and Timothée Schwartz, right, review images from the motion sensor cameras from bird boxes. They recognized an unfamiliar tag and traced it back to a research center in Spain. It is rare to find European rollers migrate to other nests than their native territories.
Emily Walker looks through binoculars to view rollers flying around the trees where bird boxes are located.
“Ringing the birds, being a part of that process, is a lot of fun,” said Emily Walker, a volunteer for A Rocha Mas Mireille.
“Having the opportunity to be a part of such a unique research project like this is very cool. There’s a very small number of people in this world who have actually been able to hold a roller. It’s a big privilege.”
Louis Sanz, left, and Emily Walker, right, take note of the rollers’ sizes to use later for their research project.
A roller is put into a bag so it can be brought back to the bird box after being ringed with museum tags. Approximately five birds get ringed from each bird box at a time.
The full photo story and article can be found here.
Written article by McCade Hayes.