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 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.

Askar Isabekov has merged data from different birdwatching websites on the Birds of Northern Eurasia portal. This database allows to monitor appearing new pictures and observations of various bird species in several countries of Northern Eurasia, including Short-toed Eagles. At least 3 out of currently 12 regional sites were mentioned on HoverOverUs before.

The live broadcast from a nest of the same pair of Short-toed Eagles living in the Judean Foothills /map/ has been renewed by Guilad Friedemann and the team again. This is the fourth breeding season of the pair we can watch in real time on the Israeli Birding Portal, and the fifth one if you include the live stream in 2015. The history of the current project and all video footages of Short-toed Eagles and other birds of prey available since 2016 can be found on the Israel Raptor Nest Cam Facebook page.

Please note: when the broadcast is unavailable just reload the page or revisit it a bit later.

Please look through the series of photos of Short-toed Eagles taken by Bernard Joubert in Haute-Loire /map/ in the past few years, showing the impressive variability of their appearance: