Please Support the Raptor Population Index Project

HMANA needs your help. Between now and June 2011, HMANA needs to raise over $55,000 from private sources in order to take full advantage of nearly $100,000 in grant funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) for the Raptor Population Index (RPI) project.

With your help RPI will continue to conduct research into raptor population trends that can be critical to continent-wide conservation efforts. Please visit RPI’s website (www.rpi.org) for details on RPI’s accomplishments.

RPI’s work also provides important support to many services HMANA provides the hawk watching, birding and conservation communities. Thanks to your contributions and funding from NFWF in the past, the RPI project has helped HMANA enhance its support of local hawk watches, widen its monitoring network, and expand reporting features for HawkCount.

In fact, one of the most important beneficiaries of RPI’s work is HMANA’s HawkCount. HMANA’s Monitoring Site Coordinator, Julie Tilden, whose employment, incidentally, funding for RPI has helped make possible, wrote on this site in a previous blog about some of the expanded services HawkCount is able to provide because of RPI (“HawkCount …. So Much More than Just Daily Totals,” November 30, 2009); in a later blog, I wrote about the importance of HawkCount to hundreds of local hawk watches throughout North America (“HawkCount and Local Hawk Watches,” March 19, 2010). All the recent improvements to HawkCount have been made possible largely through the RPI project.

Please review Julie’s and my previous blogs about HawkCount, visit www.hawkcount.org and RPI’s website, then decide how much you can donate to help HMANA raise the money that will make it possible to continue RPI’s important work. You can donate on line at www.hmana.org or request a donation form from Julie Tilden (tilden@hmana.org). HMANA is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, so your donation is fully tax-deductible.