NEW EDITOR OF SANDGROUSE

After three years as editor of Sandgrouse, Mike Blair is handing over the reins to Peter Cowan. We are particularly pleased that Mike will remain involved, moving to the position of Assistant Editor. We thank him for his enthusiasm and energy over the last three years.
We are pleased to welcome Peter Cowan. Peter is a zoologist with a Canadian bird-behaviour doctorate. His passion is deserts and desert birds, having lived and worked in Libya, Kuwait and Yemen. He has been a member of the Kuwait rarities committee since it was founded in 1994. His email address is sandgrouseATosme.org

A key role of OSME is to support projects that further bird conservation in the region. To that end we awarded £7500 to projects in 2007 - 50% more than in 2006, which was itself a record amount. The chart below shows the considerable increase in our support for projects over the last five years.

Recent awards include:
£1120 contribution to the costs of a WIWO expedition to Barr Al Hickman, Oman in January 2008. This will provide data on the abundance and ecology of wintering shorebirds.
£750 contribution to the costs of the Winter Waterbird Count in Oman in January 2008. This survey is designed to complement the WIWO expedition to Barr Al Hickman.
£500 towards the cost of an expedition along the western coast of the Caspian Sea in Dagestan in Spring/Summer 2008. The expedition will assess the status of key species in this region.
£250 to the Palmyra Wildlife Society to enable them to create a website to grow local interest in the wildlife of this region of Syria.

We welcome applications for grants from our Conservation and Research Fund, to support research projects in the region. Projects should be directed to one or more of the following subject areas:
i) investigating the status of threatened or near-threatened species
ii) attempting to further knowledge of existing Important Bird Areas (eg undertaking breeding censuses, visiting out-of-season to conduct systematic counts)
iii) investigating potential new Important Bird Areas or little-known areas
iv) conducting ecological studies of little-known species
v) educational projects

Priority will be given to projects involving nationals from the region and applicants are required to write up the results of their project for possible publication in Sandgrouse. For further information contact the conservation officer by post or email

As usual OSME will have a stand in the Fair at Rutland Water from 15-17 August 2008. A range of sales goods will include some hard-to-find bird literature from the region, T-shirts, caps and other OSME items. All profits from OSME's sales will go towards our Conservation Fund which supports projects in the Middle East and Central Asia, so please come and help us by spending some money. On the stand throughout will be the OSME team with occasional visitors from the Middle East. We hope to see many of you there! Once again we are grateful to Zeiss Optics for kindly offsetting part of the cost of our stand.

Osama Al-Nouri from the Syrian Society for the Conservation of Wildlife is welcomed on to the OSME stand by Chairman, Keith Betton at the 2007 British Birdwatching Fair.

British Birdwatching Fair 2007. OSME Vice Presidents, Imad Atrash (from the Palestine Wildlife Society) and Dan Alon (from the Israeli Ornithological Center) together with OSME Chairman, Keith Betton.

British Birdwatching Fair 2007. Chris Harbard receives the Bird Brain trophy from Bill Oddie.

Quite simply, Gift Aid means that for every £1 you give us - whether in the form of membership subscriptions or donations - OSME can claim a further 28p from HM Revenue & Customs. Already a significant number of our UK members have allowed us to do this and it costs them nothing more than a signature on a simple form declaring that UK tax has been paid and authorising OMSE to claim it back. There are still plenty of UK members who have not signed a Gift Aid form. We particularly want more members to do this now as from April the basic tax rate goes from 22% to 20% and the Gift Aid we can claim for a £15 UK membership subscription reduces from £4.23 to £3.75 - an 11% reduction - let's increase the number of Gift Aiders to offset this loss. To ask for the form to sign please send an email to our Treasurer.

OSME Council has recently confirmed that OSME's Caucasus region includes not only the transcaucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia but also the ciscau-casian North Caucasus geographic region up to 45°N, to include a part of the Russian Federation (see Map). The North Caucasus includes the highest mountain in Europe, Elbrus at 5642m asl, part of the Greater Caucasus range that straddles and follows the border between the North Caucasus and Georgia, with western and eastern extensions in the North Caucasus and Azerbaijan respec­tively. As well as mountain and upland areas, the North Caucasus contains the Caspian lowlands of Dagestan and the Russian coastlands of the Black Sea.