NUTTER nominations and community projects – meeting report

Mammalwatching community meeting 27/01/2024

Last Saturday a great group of mammalwatchers gathered in the most recent mammalwatching community meeting, hosted by Felis.

On the agenda were the famous NUTTER awards, projects to enhance mammalwatching and contribute to conservation and a small intermezzo by Charles Foley to discuss potential roles of a big mammal day.

After a small introduction by all participants we set to work creating a short list of nominees for the NUTTER awards. The nominations received prior to the meeting were combined with nominations from Valentin and Ruben digging through hundreds of reports. Bringing them to some of the darkest places of the website. The dark mammalweb you could call it. 

We then divided ourselves into two break-out rooms discussing which nominations should be kept and which ones didn’t make the cut per category. Some nominations were added during the discussions. Afterwards the whole group discussed together resulting in a shortlist from which you can pick your favorite nomination and who should win a NUTTER award. So stay tuned as voting will start soon

Of course we are always critical of ourselves and discussed which categories should be kept, changed, merged, discarded,… – there will be some changes!

Charles with the help from Venkat and others have been working on some potential guidelines for having a big mammalday. These guidelines should help create a level playing ground for all people wanting to do a big mammal day. Charles wanted our opinion on the guidelines and some finetuning was done based on the feedback received during the meeting. The basis of the rules are the same as those for a big bird day but changed a bit for a better fit to do a mammalwatching big day.

As a last item we discussed the community projects. During the last time many good ideas were generated. Following this meeting we will be focussing on a mammalwatching course and mammalwatching database. There are some very motivated community members willing to participate in the build of the projects. Join them here: http://tinyurl.com/mammalwatchingprojects

This meeting once again showed that the mammalwatching community is a very enthusiastic and motivated community. Not just for traveling and writing reports but also boosting the knowledge of sustainable and ethical mammalwatching and engaging others to combine mammalwatching and conservation to protect what we love: Mammals.

If you want to help out please send us a mail and we can provide some more information. Everyone is welcome.

Kind regards,
Ruben & Valentin

 

www.projectfelis.org

 

Post author

Ruben Vernieuwe

1 Comment

  • Jon Hall

    The dark mammal web… I love it. And when people search for this – as I am sure they will – we will get lots more traffic to the site 🙂

Leave a Reply