The Barn Owl Project
An Ecological Solution in Agriculture for Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians
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Online Webinar
Join us on January 22nd for a webinar with Professor Yossi Leshem on his highly successful environmental project that has helped connect people in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan around a joint agricultural initiative.
Speaker: Yossi Leshem, Professor Emeritus in the School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, and founder of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration
About: Professor Yossi Leshem will discuss a groundbreaking initiative—begun in Israel and expanded to its neighbors—in which Barn Owls are used as biological pest-control agents of rodents in agriculture. The owls have significantly reduced the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which severely harm wildlife and migratory birds. The Jordanians and Palestinians joined this project in 2002, and it has been highly successful from both an environmental perspective and in connecting peoples and religions within this region of conflict. In light of the project’s success, it has been joined by other countries around the world, including Morocco, Switzerland, Ukraine, Georgia, Italy, Germany, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Greece, and the United States. Leshem will also describe the unique position of Israel as a locus of bird migration, where 500 million birds migrate from Europe and West Asia to Africa and back over Israel twice a year, which allows for many scientific studies on bird migration and protection.
