Spring alive is a project organised by the Polish BirdLife International Partner OTOP (Polish Society for the Protection of Birds) and its national partners all around Europe.
The project started in 2005 and is supported by funds from the RSPB (The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), AEWA and other partners.

The project aims to increase the awareness of European citizens for birds, the natural environment and the need for cross-border conservation. Its core component is an interactive website, which encourages children and families to observe and record the arrival of migratory bird species in spring each year.

Four common European bird species, the Cuckoo, the Swift, the Swallow, and the White Stork were chosen as spring messengers for the Spring Alive Project. Observations made of these birds can easily be registered on the project’s website http://www.springalive.net and then rendered into a map showing the rate at which the four designated messengers return to Europe from their wintering sites. These maps are updated daily and can also be seen on the project website in the form of country-by-country breakdowns of the actual arrival figures for these selected species.

Spring Alive is a truly unique interactive educational and promotional tool, which uses the full networking potential of the Internet to reach out to young citizens across Europe. It gives children a space to record their local bird observations and stimulates them to learn more about these birds and their migration.

Hence, the AEWA Secretariat is pleased to have been able to support this exciting BirdLife project from the very beginning. It is a truly innovative project, which enables children throughout Europe to actively participate in and help record the phenomenon of bird migration across and beyond the Continent each spring.