Circaetus gallicus information navigator

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.

The new birding database has been created this year for collecting pictures, geographical locations and other data of observations from Ukrainian birdwatchers. Among information on other species, it contains details of new records of Short-toed Eagles in various regions of Ukraine. The site has been made by Askar Isabekov and Andrew Simon as an analog of the well-known project for Kazakhstan that has already existed for 10 years. One more similar website is dedicated to Siberian birds. There is not any record of Short-toed Eagle on the last one yet; nevertheless, even isolated observations made at the edge of the species range would be of the great interest for ST Eagle researchers.

The northern part of Chernihiv Region, so-called the Chernihiv Polissya /map/, is one of the best regions of Ukraine for Short-toed Eagles’ habitation. These lands, rich in Grass Snakes, Vipers, other reptiles and also in old pine forests, provide the eagles with good conditions for foraging and nesting. An expert in Ukrainian birds of prey, Sergey Domashevsky, during the expedition in 2009 has recorded several probable territorial pairs of the eagles there. Some of them were observed between the Sozh, the Dnieper rivers and Zamglay Bog /map/.

This year a local birdwatcher, Artem Skeeter, has found Short-toed Eagles’ nest at a place where he saw them during a few years before. Artem has discovered the nest just after finding of one old tail feather under a perch at the breeding site. He has managed to take a video of feeding the juvenile eagle by its father on a pine within the site. Also photos of the birds have been taken there in 2011-2012 and this year by Artem and by Andrew Simon, Viktor Moroz and me. This year’s juvenile could already fly on August 9. The date is the earliest known in Northern Ukraine for the last 10 years. On September 9 another juvenile Short-toed Eagle, judging by all, an offspring of the neighbour pair, was observed in the hovering flight over typical hunting grounds far from forests, that is unusually early for this region too.