Rookwood Art & Print is committed to using artworks to generate help and support for the natural environment:
Rob Davies donates 10% of sales of books, paintings and prints from the Dehesa location to the Vulture Conservation Foundation; 10% of sales of paintings & prints from the African Raptor collection to The Peregrine Fund; 10% of sales of books, paintings and prints from the Karoo project to Vulture reintroduction; 10% of sales of books, paintings and prints from the Pembrokeshire project to Llanunwas Rewilding & Wildlife Rehabilitation Project.
Ian and Gill Bullock donate to the Seychelles Bird Trust
Richard RensonWise donates 20% of all sales to Cairo Equine Charity
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To understand our commitment to conservation please read this background from Rob Davies:
Besides my family I have always been surrounded by an interesting menagerie. On the farm here at Llanunwas we usually have some injured wildlife that we are looking after. There have been owls, hawks of all shapes and sizes, and all the members of the fantastic crow family passing through our rehabilitation wards in recent years. Much thanks to our vet friend Dr Tom Bailey for any successes! We also breed Turtle Doves and Grey Partridges for release into the wild habitats that we have recreated on the farm with the help of Sarah and Andy from the Bug Farm. The Welsh Assembly Government allocated some funds to us to restore wild meadows for the flora and insects, and hedgerow refuges for the Harvest Mice and others. Every so often we get encouragement when Kestrels or Spotted Flycatchers return to breed at Llanunwas.
My story in conservation started near here on the hill Penberi where Peregrine Falcons held out during the years of persecution and DDT. It was my first sighting of these supreme birds as a youngster that set me on my life course, working for their conservation (we are currently caring for one of the Penberi birds that was injured in a collision). I also, was really lucky to grow up with some family in Africa who exposed me to the magnificent wildlife there on holidays to the game reserves. So it was a natural move to go out to Africa in 1981 and I spent twenty years exploring all corners of this vast and exciting continent. There were many, many adventures. You cannot not have these living in Africa. Whether it was dangling from a tree over the Nwanedzi River in Kruger Park collecting Fish Eagle eggs to study pesticide contamination; painting the ecosystem at Lake Nakuru for a WWF information centre; rehabilitating a Martial Eagle from a windmill in the Karoo while studying sheep; or hand-raising a baby Black Eagle called Samburu. It was my dream come true.
During my studies on eagles in the Karoo I got into mapping, computer-mapping or Geographic Information Systems GIS as it is known. I had gone down the scientific route at that stage and I found this technology very inspiring. All of a sudden I could view the conservation problems as if from the air, and so often there were neat geographic solutions that could be found to help people live alongside wildlife. It was a field I got to know well and it kept me employed much of my life culminating in my own GIS lab called Habitat Info which was a consultancy run out of Rookwood Studios at Llanunwas. It began with mapping the potential connections to be made between the massive protected areas in Africa. I was fortunate to work on this with Professor John Hanks of WWF and the Peace Parks Foundation an amazing initiative of Dr Anton Rupert in South Africa. Their first success was the Kgalagadi (Kalahari) Transfrontier Park allowing tourists to move over much greater areas of Botswana and South Africa. I was also involved in a NGO dedicated to conserving birds of prey across Africa and it was gratifying to work with the farmers and bring back the Bateleur Eagle to Northern Cape farmland for the first time in over 100 years. We hosted the first international film festival on birds of prey in Johannesburg as a fund raiser and we invited the World Conference on Birds of Prey to meet in Midrand, South Africa. Later with my friends at OneWorld in Cape Town, I found a wider use of the GIS to help people adapt to the ravages of climate change across southern Africa where extreme weather can cause floods or crop failures and these ‘people projects’ became the main work of Habitat Info.
In 2001 I made the return to my homeland in Wales, to be with the family and to come up with a plan for our farm Llanunwas. I thought it would be easy coming home but for a while I seriously thought it must be a different sun it was such a contrast. It took a bit of adjusting but I found that I could do pretty much the same work here in Wales, just on a slightly different scale. I was lucky to be involved with another bird of prey NGO working to stop persecution of raptors on Malta and on grouse moors, and then I found an obvious application of GIS methods establishing the fourth biological records centre completing the coverage for the whole of Wales. Again there were geographic solutions to be found to enable development by local authorities while preserving the best of our biodiversity.
I hadn’t finished with African raptors though, and with the help of Andrew Rayner, Tim Wroblewski (who now continues the mapping projects through TACP in Cardiff) and Simon Trice we developed a citizen science project involving a pioneering mobile app for recording raptor sightings. We gathered some 600 observers across the African continent and soon generated a large database of where the birds still lived. Raptors, being at the top of their food chains are obvious indicators of where healthy ecosystems still exist and can be protected. In the case of vultures this need is acute. Up to 80% of vulture populations have collapsed in Africa in the last few decades from intentional and unintentional poisoning. We produced a map of the habitat strongholds for vultures across Africa where conservationists can focus their efforts to save these birds.
Our project the African Raptor Databank was supported from the start by The Peregrine Fund. When other agencies told me Africa was too big ‘you have to choose a smaller area for the project’ (!) The Peregrine Fund said ‘why stop at Africa, let’s go global!’ And so our project has grown into a mobile app in five languages with data now coming in from all over the world. All of these projects which started with Habitat Info are now being run very capably by my friend and colleague Tim Wroblewski who was with them at the outset. Anyone interested in learning more about these conservation / mapping projects can contact Tim at TACP in Cardiff.
I had the good fortune of meeting Bill Clark, author of many raptor identification books, at a raptor conference in Berlin, and Bill invited me to co-author a fieldguide on African raptors commissioned by Croom Helm, Bloomsbury. Illustrating all the diurnal birds of prey of Africa took me a lot longer than I expected but after many adventures together across the continent, we managed to get our book published in 2018. There are still a few original plates left to purchase and I am glad to direct 10% of sales of these and prints to say thank you to The Peregrine Fund, African Raptor Program, for all their help over the years and ongoing good work. The plate featuring African Fish Eagle and Osprey was donated to raise funds for the Raptor Working Group at Endangered Wildlife Trust.
Of all African raptors, vultures are clearly the most threatened at the moment. In some parts of Africa populations have crashed by more than 80% of former numbers due to poisoning. Yet they are a really essential component of our ecosystems clearing up rotting carcases and preventing the spread of diseases and harmful insects like blowflies. The human health cost of losing nearly all vultures across India ran into billions of dollars over a twelve year period.
So I am very glad to be able to send 10% of proceeds of sales on Karoo artworks to a vulture conservation project in the Karoo; and 10% of proceeds of sales on Dehesa artworks to the Vulture Conservation Foundation to help fund ‘vulture restaurants’ along the Spanish / Portuguese border. Amanda Squire and I made a wonderful journey through the cork oak savannas of this region in September 2023. It is an extraordinary rich habitat for wildlife and one of the few places on earth where human land use practices actually favour large wildlife species. These rare paradises need flagging up and looking after.