Congratulations to all the people involved in AEWA on the 25th anniversary of the Agreement. It is excellent that we have come this far, and it is good to see detailed activities undertaken at the practical level, which we believed from the start could be provided by a conservation and management tool such as AEWA. Developing a flyway conservation plan was not an entirely new concept when work on AEWA started in the late eighties. For a long time, bird conservationists believed that the protection and management of birds should be implemented across the entire range: the breeding, stopover and wintering sites.