Circaetus gallicus information navigator

The Batumi Raptor Count monitors the autumn migration of more than 1 million raptors including thousands of ST Eagles along the eastern Black Sea coast in Georgia at the Batumi bottleneck /map/.

• Wouter M.G. VANSTEELANT, Jasper WEHRMANN, Dries ENGELEN, Johannes JANSEN, Brecht VERHELST, Rafa BENJUMEA, Simon CAVAILLÈS, Triin KAASIKU, Bart HOEKSTRA & Folkert de BOER, 2019 – Accounting for differential migration strategies between age groups to monitor raptor population dynamics in the eastern Black Sea flyway // Ibis. doi:10.1111/ibi.12773 – (En).

Also, other publications are available at the BRC site.

On the eve of the New Year, let’s have a look at the following remarkable pictures taken by different photographers in India in 2019 which present dramatic and curious moments of Short-toed Eagles’ life:

Also, the authors of the shots tell stories behind them.

This video footage is made up of short parts shot in Northern Ukraine within 2017-2019 years during field observations at Short-toed Eagles’ breeding and hunting areas. The attention was aimed rather at various kinds of behaviour, including territorial conflicts, training of juveniles, individual behavioural features of particular birds.

Gábor Papp has collected and summarized information about colour-ringing of Short-toed Eagles in Hungary. The program has been continued for 7 years. The current numbers of ringed eagles, observations and photographing of the birds, prospects of new resightings are described in the communication:

• Gábor PAPP, 2019 – Results of the colour-ringing scheme of the Short-toed Eagle in Hungary between 2013 and 2019 // short-toed-eagle.net (En).

The following papers about Short-toed Eagle mentioned on HoverOverUs before have recently appeared on ResearchGate portal in free access:

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.