GrassBirdHabitats: Home

LIFE Integrated Project

Welcome to the website of the LIFE IP GrassBirdHabitats project, an EU-funded initiative dedicated to protecting meadow birds and their habitats. Our goal is to create and connect optimal breeding and non-breeding areas along the East Atlantic Flyway.

The project focuses on habitat conservation and restoration in Lower Saxony (Germany) and Fryslân (the Netherlands) while also developing a strategic conservation plan for the Atlantic region of Europe and West Africa.

The project will run for ten years. It started in November 2020 and will be concluded by the end of October 2030.

Last year, more than 200 breeding pairs of the rare Black-tailed Godwit nested in the Dümmer marsh, and the species is still present in the Boller…

Corinna Langebrake, our newest team member, started working at the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park Administration (NLPV) last month. Her main…

Last week marked an early surprise as the first Black-tailed Godwit reached Lake Dümmer after spending the last few months in its wintering grounds.…

A group of people are standing in a cowshed. Cows can be seen in the background. On the right of the picture is a hand-painted wall with various birds.

In order to learn from the respective working practices of the project partners, members of the NLWKN GrassBirdHabitats team visited their project…

Since the beginning of 2022, a team of Collectief Súdwestkust is working with a local journalist to publish a column called “Weidevogelman”. With this…

A booklet lies open on a table. It shows some parts of this website. Next to it are some hand-written notes.

The new website for the LIFE Integrated Project GrassBirdHabitats launched today. It features a more detailed description of the project and the…

A map showing southern Portugal and Spain and Morocco. On top of this there is a blue line indicating movement. The line comes from Central Europe, moves towards Portugal, then Morocco, then back to Portugal, then south right through Morocco.

Within the scope of the LIFE IP GrassBirdHabitats, 24 new Black-tailed Godwits were tagged with GPS transmitters in 2023. One of them is the female…

A Lapwing seen from the side. It stands on a small patch of grass surrounded by flat-flooded grassland.

The decline of wet grassland breeding bird populations across Europe, and Germany more specifically, continues unabated. In an effort to address this…

Top-down view of a bird nest on the ground. Inside the nest made from dry grass lie four brown-dotted eggs. Above and to the sides of the nest is tall grass.

Our recently released press information depicts an exceptional conservation initiative focused on the Common Snipe. Ornithologists from various…

The figure summarises what is explained in the news blog text. See the full news article for further information.

Migratory birds fly southwards in autumn to spend the winter in warmer regions. To get there, the birds use different migratory routes. Most…

Three men stand next to each other. The man on the left presents a small booklet that features a Blak-tailed Godwit on the front. The man in the middle looks at the booklet. The man on the right smiles into the camera.

Our precursor project LIFE Meadow Birds is coming to an end. Currently, the last measures in the project areas Butjadingen and Dümmer are being…

What we do

To improve the conservation status of meadow birds along the East Atlantic Flyway, a team of more than 40 people is carrying out various measures. Their common goal is to increase the birds' reproduction rates in the Netherlands and Germany and to improve their return rates from their wintering grounds in West Africa.

More about our measures

Our focus species

Transmitter birds

In six years of challenging field work, we have tagged more than 150 adult and juvenile Black-tailed Godwits in total, and collected more than 210.000 locations. We use lightweight GPS transmitters with lots of different sensors to gain detailed movement and behavioural data from the birds.

With this information, we want to improve conservation measures for Black-tailed Godwits and other meadow birds along the East Atlantic Flyway.

Track our Godwits More about our transmitter birds

The project in numbers

0 mil. € out of 353 mil. €

complementary funding acquired

0 ha

total project area

0 %

of all European Black-tailed Godwits breed in Germany and the Netherlands

0 birds

tagged with GPS transmitters

Where we work

Our project areas comprise the core breeding areas of meadow birds in the north-western European Plain (in Lower Saxony and Fryslân) and their core stopover and wintering sites along the East Atlantic Flyway.

More about our project areas

LIFE IP GrassBirdHabitats

Conservation of wet grassland breeding bird habitats in the atlantic region

LIFE Integrated Project

More space for Black-tailed Godwits and fellows at the Dümmer

Team growth in the project: Meet biologist Dr Corinna Langebrake

This year’s arrival of the first Black-tailed Godwit at Lake Dümmer

Project workshop on agriculture and meadow bird conservation

The Meadow Bird Man

New web presence

Bird migration is not always straightforward

Current status of meadow birds in Germany

Like a needle in a haystack

Are migratory routes inherited?

Results booklet on the LIFE project Meadow Birds published

What we do

Our focus species

Black-tailed Godwit

Corncrake

Northern Lapwing

Common Snipe

Eurasian Curlew