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Three young Short-toed Eagles were tagged with transmitters when they were yet in the nests in Hungary, Montenegro and Italy in 2019. The eagles now are 2cy immature birds, still being tracked and their migration behaviour is of great interest.

The long field research on two raptors Short-toed Eagle and Long-legged Buzzard in the Judean Foothills /map/ allowed Guilad Friedemann to prepare his PhD Thesis which was published a few years ago:

• Guilad FRIEDEMANN, Yossi LESHEM, Ido IZHAKI, 2016 – Multidimensional differentiation in foraging resource use and competitive interactions over nesting sites between two sympatric top predators – PhD.Thesis: 104 p. – (En).

The document available at ResearchGate also contains articles published earlier and already covered on our site.

The research continues and we are looking forward to new broadcasts, videos and papers shared by the Israeli team.

Kunal Kambli in his recent post for The Weather Channel writes that Short-toed Eagle is among the species whose populations in India have declined in last years according to:

• SoIB 2020. State of India’s Birds, 2020: Range, trends and conservation status. The SoIB Partnership. Pp 50. – (En).

Unlike others, the population of Short-toeds in India is settled. Although, there are no more or less exact evaluations of its current size, it is undoubtedly significant, and the species is under highest legal protection in the country. However, the short- and long-term negative trends are ascertained on the background of the global population trend estimated as stable. This is a kind of unpleasant surprise and causes of the local population decline deserve to be figured out and analysed in details.

Egidio is an adult Short-toed Eagle male tagged with a satellite transmitter being a chick in the Regional Park Gallipoli Cognato /map/ in 2013. He successfully bred in 2019 and had his own fledgling. The juvenile Short-toed has been tagged with a transmitter as well and named Michele after late Michele Panuccio. The tracker was installed at the end of July by Michele’s friends, members of the Mediterranean Raptor Migration Network: Ugo Mellone, Nicolantonio Agostini, Giuseppe Lucia and Vicente Urios (MEDRAPTORS.org, MEDRAPTORS Facebook).

Current tracks of both the eagles are available on the project page.

Please read the obituary for Michele Panuccio:

• Nicolantonio AGOSTINI and Ugo MELLONE, 2019 – Obituary – Michele Panuccio, 1976-2019 // Avocetta, 43 (1): pp. 95-96. – (En).

A juvenile Short-toed Eagle was released after a month spent in the Rehabilitation Centre «Вільні Крила» (Free Wings) at the vicinity of Lviv /map/ (Western Ukraine) at the end of September. For the last week, that eagle named Java has covered 330 km and reached Romania. The young short-toed tries to stick to areas potentially rich in snakes, such as numerous river floodplains. You can follow the eagle on the map of its migration which is daily updated. That bird had been contused about two weeks after leaving the nest. Viktor Shelvinskyi and Pavlo Kruchok provided the best conditions to recover young Short-toed Eagle as quickly as possible. An installation of the Ecotone GPS-GSM transmitter was provided by Andrew Simon as a part of the project on Greater Spotted and Short-toed Snake Eagles in Northern Ukraine launched this year.

Örs the satellite-tagged Short-toed Eagle, marked as a juvenile in 2017, has returned to Hungary after two years. He hatched in the area of the Kiskunság National Park /map/ being famous for hosting the only known nesting population in the Hungarian lowlands. He spent the past winter in the Sahel Zone on the border of Sudan and South Sudan, a regular wintering area for the species. On the last day of March, he packed up and started his northbound migration, however, he stopped in Central Turkey and we were worried that he would spend the entire summer there again, after the summer of 2018. Fortunately, he decided to move on on June 24 and to our delight, he reached the border between Croatia and Hungary a bit more than a week later. Since then, he paid a visit to Burgenland, Austria and Western Slovakia where he stopped at military bases, which were probably familiar for him since he was born in one of those in Hungary. Recently, he has been in Northwestern Hungary, an area where observations of this species are quite rare.

We hope eventually he will visit his home ground and may also mark a few, so far unknown, territories in the Kiskunság area.

Gábor Papp

The map of Örs’ tracks is available on SATELLITETRACKING.EU.

This online database contains observations of birds in Western and Central Africa, including many records of Short-toed Eagles in Niger and Chad, i.e. in the traditional wintering area of the eagles from Europe and the Middle East. All records are linked to the map, some of them has photos taken in the wild, exporting data to MS Excel is available.