Circaetus gallicus information navigator

The 4^th meeting of the Short-toed Snake Eagle French national network is planned to be held: welcome to the Cathar Country!

The 4^th meeting of the network will be hosted by Nature Midi-Pyrénées and LPO Mission Rapaces in Roquefixade (the Ariège Department) /map/ on October 8^th & 9^th, 2016.

The sessions will be held in the town hall where the Eagle Owl meeting was held in 2014. Detailed information about food and accommodation of the participants will be available soon in the next announcement and the registration form.

As usual, the presentations cover various topics: general monitoring of Short-toed Eagle in various regions by local groups, various fields of biology or ecoethology, protection and conservation of the species… All your works are of interest and deserve to be better known.
The presentations should take not more than 20 minutes to allow 10 minutes discussion after each of them. Proposals of your speeches are expected from now on.
To be accepted, your submission must be sent in the form of a summary to one of us (emails below) by July 30^th in order to set the agenda for the two days of the meeting.

A registration brochure will be available very soon. Thanks in advance for retaining the date in your fall calendar!

View the original message please: Read the rest of this entry »

This video is a compilation of various short parts of the filming done in Northern Ukraine during the last year’s season from spring to fall. The shown moments of Short-toed Eagles’ life are provided with explanatory subtitles. The second part of the annual photo gallery contains descriptions of behaviour and habits of local STEs as well. Please see them under each presented picture.

We wrote about these two papers (López-Iborra et al., Yáñez et al.) after they had been published. Now full texts of them are available as well:

• G. M. López-Iborra, R. Limiñana, D. Pavón and J. E. Martínez-Pérez, 2011 – Modelling the distribution of Short-toed Eagle (Circaetus gallicus) in semi-arid Mediterranean landscapes: identifying important explanatory variables and their implications for its conservation // European Journal of Wildlife Research, 57: pp. 83-93. – (En).

• B. Yáñez, A.-R. Muñoz, K. L. Bildstein, I. Newton, A. G. Toxopeus and M. Ferrer, 2014 – Individual Variation in the Over-Summering Areas of Immature Short-Toed Snake Eagles Circaetus gallicus // Acta Ornithologica, 49 (1): pp. 137-141. – (En).

The presented work is available on a website of the Electronic Theses & Dissertations Center. It is based on unique research data of Guilad Friedemann collected in period of 2011-2014. The main goal of the work was detection of the correlation between various environmental factors and migratory movements of Short-toed Eagles and Long-legged Buzzards of the Judean Foothills’ populations /map/:

• Krystaal Moonchyld McClain, 2015 – Environmental Drivers of Migration in Two Israeli Raptor Species – M.Sc.Thesis: 106 p. – (En).

Returning to the important topic of correct identification of differently aged Short-toed Eagles in the nature, Gábor Papp has tried to briefly describe the main characters of juvenile, 2, 3 and 4 cy eagles, and also visual differences between adult males and females. His description are illustrated with the corresponding images. Here is two versions of the text, Hungarian and English ones:

• Gábor PAPP, 2015 – A kígyászölyv kor és ivarhatározása – segédlet a terepi megfigyelések minőségének javításához [Ageing and sexing of the Short-toed Eagle – an aid to improve the quality of field observations in Hungary] // short-toed-eagle.net – (Hu), (En).

How different reproduction of different pairs can be? Some adult Short-toed Eagles occupy the same sites from year to year. They had yet been identified in 2011 by photos taken since 2006 and according to previous and new observations. The birds had got indexes A11, B11 etc. although, in spoken communication we give them more harmonious names: for example, K11 is Barry, B11 is Ospry, and so on. Then later pictures of the individuals repeatedly got into the annual photo galleries. The natural identifying details are general plumage patterns, shapes of heads, wings, beaks and general silhouettes in flight from certain angles as well as signs of moulting. The number of the examined images should be enough to select the details and to collate them. Thus, now it is possible to compare the mean reproduction – – of pairs of individuals identified from year to year for certain, definitely without replacements of mates and without clear differences in objective conditions for breeding.

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.