Circaetus gallicus information navigator

The long field research on two raptors Short-toed Eagle and Long-legged Buzzard in the Judean Foothills /map/ allowed Guilad Friedemann to prepare his PhD Thesis which was published a few years ago:

• Guilad FRIEDEMANN, Yossi LESHEM, Ido IZHAKI, 2016 – Multidimensional differentiation in foraging resource use and competitive interactions over nesting sites between two sympatric top predators – PhD.Thesis: 104 p. – (En).

The document available at ResearchGate also contains articles published earlier and already covered on our site.

The research continues and we are looking forward to new broadcasts, videos and papers shared by the Israeli team.

Kunal Kambli in his recent post for The Weather Channel writes that Short-toed Eagle is among the species whose populations in India have declined in last years according to:

• SoIB 2020. State of India’s Birds, 2020: Range, trends and conservation status. The SoIB Partnership. Pp 50. – (En).

Unlike others, the population of Short-toeds in India is settled. Although, there are no more or less exact evaluations of its current size, it is undoubtedly significant, and the species is under highest legal protection in the country. However, the short- and long-term negative trends are ascertained on the background of the global population trend estimated as stable. This is a kind of unpleasant surprise and causes of the local population decline deserve to be figured out and analysed in details.

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.

This video footage was taken by Vince Schwartz. It presents the Short-toed Eagle pair nesting in the Visegrád Hills /map/ as well as the hunting of the male of an immature pair settled in the neighbouring Pilis Hills /map/ in 2018.

Please, read the more detailed explanation by the author:

• Vince SCHWARTZ, 2018 – Nesting of Short-toed Eagles in the Visegrád Hills in 2015-2018 // short-toed-eagle.net (En).

Many thanks to Gábor Papp for his kind help in preparing this post!

The authors of the following papers studied Short-toed Eagles among other Raptors. Here are the results of those comparative studies focused on monitoring of migrating birds and on distribution constraints:

After the first reports of the breeding of Short-toed Eagle in Switzerland, the successful attempt was observed in Central Valais /map/ in 2017:

• Raphaël ARLETTAZ, Stéphane METTAZ & Klaus AGTEN, 2018 – Première nidification réussie du Circaète Jean-le-Blanc Circaetus gallicus en Suisse romande [The first successful nesting of Short-toed Eagle in Romandy] // Nos Oiseaux 65/3, N° 533: pp. 175-179. – (Fr).

The article is available on the University of Bern website.