This will be the second award given to West Asia and the first to an Israeli project, which competed for the prize among 2,400 candidates worldwide, said the centre's Pune-born scientific director Yosef Reuven. He will receive the award from Rollex executives at a ceremony to be held at the Israeli Knesset."I felt as if I'd been placed through a wringer," said Reuven, 47, the son of an Indian Air Force pilot and a graduate of the Indian Military Academy. "I have never experienced such a rigorous selection process, in which I had to defend my entire scientific career and put my professional reputation under the microscope.

I will never forget the last three days in which I appeared before a constant battery of international ornithological experts."Reuven immigrated to Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. A former president of Kibbutz Ein Shemer near Hadera on the Mediterranean coast, he went on to obtain degrees from Haifa University and the Desert Research Institute of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and a PhD in zoology and wildlife management from the Ohio State University in the US.

Reuven is a consultant with the Bombay Natural History Society, advising ornithologists on aspects of India's enormous eagle death rate, and regularly collaborates with the World Wide Fund for Nature-India in New Delhi.

The Rollex award money of $25,000 "will focus international spotlights on the birding centre and enhance its facilities as a major biological research station tracking the feeding and physiological characteristics of some 240 different species of migratory birds," said Reuven.Each spring (mid-January to June) and autumn (late August to December), more than one billion birds reach Eilat to rest and feed before continuing their 3,000 km transcontinental flight across Israel to Europe and as far as the Arctic, Siberia and northern Scandinavia. The 64-hectare birding habitat occupies a small part of a former dry salt marsh once serving as Eilat's garbage dump. Eight years ago, the municipality, Israel government tourism development corporation and afforestation agency cleared the site, installed a drip irrigation system and pond, fed with treated sewage effluents. The area was landscaped with a variety of acacias, tamarisks, sea blight and planted with protective, shade giving, indigenous desert vegetation.

"The birding sanctuary forms a crucial gas refuelling station for tens of millions of migratory birds. Only the cream of the cream survives the arduous 3,000 km flight over the hot Sahara," said Reuven. "The stopover at Eilat is vital. They arrive completely famished and must replenish their lost fat before taking off again, otherwise they will not survive the early spring cold, snow and ice they will encounter at their summer nesting grounds."

Eilat lies at the apex of a narrow bottleneck and the millions of migratory birds descending onto the sanctuary attract some 10,000 ornithologists and wildlife photographers, mainly from the US, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, South Africa and even India. Some five million raptors comprising 39 species migrate over Eilat each year, among them eagles, harriers, sparrow hawks, falcons and vultures.

Eilat is a haven second only to New Mexico in the US, where 11 million migratory raptors of 11 different species have been counted. Eilat also constitutes an important laboratory for bio-indicators in migratory bird patterns, said Reuven.

The raptor survey of 1977 revealed an alarming 30 per cent decline in juvenile populations of the increasingly rare steppe eagle. Findings of the 1980s and 1990s revealed a further 7-9 per cent decline. A similar 50 per cent drop in juvenile populations of the sparrow hawk were also measured during the last decade, a direct result of the ecological disaster caused by the radiation leak in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, he said.

Some 10 per cent of Eilat's administrative costs are funded by Israeli government agencies. The bulk comes from private research grants and philanthropic gifts. Reuven hopes the Rollex award money will enable him to establish an endowment fund, attract international visitors and set up a biological research station.