Headquartered in the United Kingdom, BirdLife International is a global partnership of conservation organisations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats and works towards sustainability in the use of natural resources. BirdLife International Partners operate in over one hundred countries and territories worldwide and collectively have over 2,500,000 members.

In 2008, the MCFEA provided a grant of £30,000 to sponsor Birdlife International’s Spring Alive project.  Spring Alive is a pan-European project designed to promote children’s interest in nature and conservation, through tracking the arrival of migrating birds in spring. 

The core component of Spring Alive is a science web-based project that will be implemented in European countries. Children and families are encouraged to observe and record the arrival of popular migratory bird species each year and to enter data on the first observation of each species into a specially provided interactive web-site.  The website tracks the progress of spring across Europe on maps created from the data submitted. Over the years, analysis of the data will reveal trends in changes of arrival dates of the species.