Circaetus gallicus information navigator

La Plume du Circaète n° 18 – (Fr) {rough translation} was released and timed to the 5th Circaetus meeting in Gémenos; with full-size images (8.9 MB) – . The list of contents:

COMMUNICATIONS

News from Hérault

INTERNATIONAL

Many thanks to Bernard Joubert, Jean-Pierre Malafosse, Renaud Nadal and all the authors of the bulletin for sharing their data and ideas!

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 photo collection of the previous year has been continued in 2019. All individuals have their unique index like K11m, where the last letter means sex: m – male, f – female, if it is known for certain. This is the continuation of a story in pictures of permanent annual monitoring of Short-toeds in Northern Ukraine which has been made for more than 15 years.

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.

The Natuurtijdschriften site was already mentioned on HoverOverUs. Here we present to your attention some more articles published in different years and dedicated particularly to Short-toed Eagles:

All documents with mentions of STE can be found using the site search.

The Lublin Ornithology Society started their projects on GPS-GSM telemetry of local adult Short-toed Eagles in 2012. Some results of them are available on sites of the society, as well as conservation programs. Just use the Polish name of the species «Gadożer» as a search word to find info regarding Short-toeds in the submitted files:

Also, you can read some fresh news about observations of local Short-toed Eagles on the LTO page on Facebook, and enjoy this short video taken at the nest of a pair where the male is tagged with the GPS-GSM transmitter.