Birding Mongolia

reaches 100,000 pageviews

by Axel Bräunlich

When I moved to Khovd in western Mongolia in late October 2005 I started to send friends little reports of my local birdwatching activities by email. For the year of 2006 I compiled my observations in a 19-page report with many photos, which can be downloaded from the Surfbirds website (PDF, 2.5 MB): Local Spot 2006: Khovd - Bird migration in western Mongolia.

In early 2007 I decided that it would be better to make my observations available to a wider audience: I started Birding Mongolia. The first post from 8 March 2007 contained some info on sightings from Khovd, and also from the area around the monastery Manzshir near Ulaanbaatar. The first photos published were of a dust storm in Khovd, and of a Two-barred Crossbill at Manzshir Khiid.

Last week, after almost 300 posts and hundreds of photos, Birding Mongolia passed the 100,000- pageviews (“all time history”) mark!

The following 10 countries had most viewers, according to stats by Google:

USA 18,872
Germany 13,604
United Kingdom 9,169
Mongolia 6,841
Russia 3,666
Belgium 2,551
Netherlands 2,529
France 2,068
South Korea 1,070
India 1,010

Today Birding Mongolia offers much more than just listing my observations from Khovd: Trip reports, information on mammals and other animal groups, on conservation projects and organisations, bird rarity reports, information about birds from neighbouring countries (esp. Russia, China, Kazakhstan), news on bird taxonomy, bird migration, environmental news and much more. The web links on the right-hand sidebar constitute probably the most comprehensive collection of Mongolia resources (natural history and travel-related) on the Internet. Please have a look!

Over the past five years many people have contributed to my blog. I wish to thank all of them, and also thanks to the visitors of Birding Mongolia. Special thanks go to Andreas Buchheim aka Abu who wrote many very interesting contributions, including extensive trip reports, and provided many of his excellent photographs.