Wings to Fly/ Michele Panuccio Memorial Grant

The “Wings to Fly” program will provide travel support to four or five raptor researchers or conservationists from outside the U.S. and Canada attending the meeting to present a paper or poster at our annual meeting.

Each grant will include support for airfare and visa fees, $625 for food and lodging support, waived conference registration fees, and a one-year membership to RRF. The amount of the grant will depend on travel costs from the recipient’s home country. Awards will be $2,500, $2,000, or $1,500.

To learn more and apply, interested parties should submit an abstract via the Wings to Fly Awards page.

To provide time for recipients to arrange visas and travel plans, the deadline for applications will be 9 April. Decisions on the winners of the awards will be made within two weeks of the deadline for applications.

Michele Panuccio Memorial Grant

The grant provides financial support for field research on raptor migration and conservation in the European region by young researchers (no more than 35 years old). The annual grant will be up to €1,500. The Fund was established by his parents in 2021 in memory of the Italian ornithologist and ecologist Michele Panuccio (1976-2019).

Michele Panuccio was a versatile and complete field naturalist who devoted most of his life to the study of raptor migration, starting as a volunteer at the Strait of Messina in 1997. In subsequent years he took a leading role in various monitoring projects, especially on islands along the Italian-Tunisian flyway. He completed his doctorate on trans-Mediterranean raptor migration at the University of Pavia in 2012. Thanks to his contagious passion, he involved many young ornithologists in studies from the Calabrian Apennines in Italy to Greece and Turkey. He collaborated on field studies in Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and Thailand. His rigorous and exhaustive observations were meticulously analyzed and published in dozens of scientific papers.

The Panuccio grant seeks to help advance fields that Michele tirelessly worked on. The grant will support research into:

● Raptor behavior, such as differential migration between age and sex classes, the effect of weather and atmospheric currents on migration, social interactions, and orientation and navigation strategies, with a special focus on how raptors overcome large ecological barriers such as the Mediterranean Sea.

● Raptor conservation, for which Michele developed a particular interest as a park ranger at the Decima-Malafede Nature Reserve (Rome), where he learned the importance of natural protected area management and monitoring for the conservation of local raptors.

● Raptor monitoring, which has been a long-standing interest of Michele, and to which he devoted much of his final years at the Strait of Messina.

Applications will be considered through June 30. For more information and to apply please visit the Panuccio Grant Award page.