To call for attention and urgent actions to save knots, EAAFP had marked 2017 and 2018 as “Year of the Knots”. One of the campaign activities was the organization of Knots Painting Competition. The painting competitions happened both in 2017 and 2018. The 2018 Knots Painting Competition was open to participating from 31 Aug 2018 to 3 Jan 2019. The winners of the competition were announced on 31 Jan 2019. Whereas the 2017 competition was open only for participants under 18, the 2018 painting competition accepted paintings of anyone over 6 years old who reside in the 22 countries along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. We were delighted to receive sponsorship from private companies, organizations and individuals, including Kowa, Patagonia, Wholesee, Pukororo Miranda National Trust, and David and Lynne Lawrie. This competition was advertised in 18 countries which are EAAFP partners and the materials were produced in 4 languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean.

By 3 Jan 2019, the secretariat received 149 applications. 127 out of 149 were accepted since they had followed the application procedure properly. 127 paintings came from 7 countries: 6 paintings from Thailand, 35 from RO Korea, 2 from Australia, 4 from Indonesia, 75 from Japan, 3 from Hong Kong, and 2 from Singapore. We divided the participants into three categories by age and we got 65 paintings in Category A (age 6 ~ 10), 23 Category in B (11 ~ 17) and 39 in Category C (18 and over).

Here are the paintings of the Grand Prizes in the 3 categories.

Category A: A lonely knot (Jio Lee, RO Korea)

Category B: Hoping for Harmonious Home (Ho Wan Ching, Hong Kong)

Category C: Harmonic living with Red Knots (Ratih Dewanti, Indonesia)

We would like to thank all the judges along the EAAF, they are: Mr. Casey Burns (USA), Ms. Janet Essley (Australaia), Ms. Narisa Togo (Japan), Ms. Sandra Hails (former CEPA Working Group chair), Ms. Tomoko Ichikawa (Japan) and Ms. Vivian Fu (EAAFP Secretariat). Special thanks go to Ms. Hiroko Okamoto of Wild Bird Society of Japan and Ms. Yee Lai of Hong Kong Bird Watching Society to help to translate the materials into Japanese and Chinese respectively.

For the results in detail and the paintings by the winners on the EAAFP web page below:

Winners: https://www.eaaflyway.net/2018_knots_winners/

Results and detailed information about the competition: https://www.eaaflyway.net/activities/eaafp-campaigns/year-of-the-knots-2017-2018/