SUPPORT FOR IMPORTANT BIRD AREAS

Good day
The Important Bird Areas Programme managed by BirdLife South Africa aims to identify, monitor and protect over 100,000 km² of habitats that contain the most threatened bird species in South Africa. This programme is implemented through the involvement of a network of grassroots community members and birders, local and national government agencies, universities and NGOs.
The Important Bird Areas of Southern Africa directory by Keith Barnes was compiled in 1998 and identified within South Africa 122 IBAs. All of these IBAs were objectively determined using established and globally accepted criteria.

One of the strengths of the programme is that it endeavours to involve a wide range of people, from people at community level, professional conservationists, bird-watchers and members of bird clubs. The IBA programme therefore provides a wide range of opportunities to individuals and organisations to become actively involved with bird conservation. It is therefore important that the IBA programme is accessible to interested parties, and BirdLife South Africa is therefore pleased to launch an IBA webpage on the BirdLife South Africa website - www.birdlife.org.za. This IBA webpage allows people to access interesting information about the IBA programme and individual IBAs.

In order to identify people that would like to make a contribution to this project BirdLife South Africa has also created a webpage where you can indicate where and how you would like to make a contribution to this project. Please note your contribution can vary from monitoring threats at an IBA (for example housing developments encroaching on an IBA) to
submitting SABAP2, CWAC or BIRP lists for an IBA. The page can be viewed at:
http://www.birdingroutes.co.za/iba/contact.html.

As soon as you have submitted your information your contact details will be entered into a database that we can reference for future use.

There is also an option to receive a bi-monthly e-newsletter about the IBA programme. So even if you cannot contribute specifically to an IBA you can select this option and we will forward the IBA e-newsletter to you.

We have also created a Google Earth based map (http://www.birdingroutes.co.za/iba/iba.html) where you can view the boundaries for all the IBAs in South Africa. If you click on any of the IBAs you can view some basic information about the IBA and there are also links to the IBA text as published in the IBA directory and the species lists as published on the SABAP2 website for each IBA.

Please consider supporting this great initiative and make a contribution to conserving South Africa’s bird diversity.

Thank you

Ernst F Retief

Regional Conservation Manager
Gauteng and North West
BirdLife South Africa

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