Circaetus gallicus information navigator

Egidio the adult male Short-toed Eagle has been mentioned on our site since 2013. His chick named Michele in memory of Michele Panuccio was tagged with a transmitter as well in 2019. The young eagle has returned to the region of birth exactly like his father did it in his second calendar year. You can read a story of them on the Inglorious Bustards site:

• S. TONKIN, 2020 – A tale of two Eagles // ingloriousbustards.com (En).

Also, Ugo Mellone tells about the tagged Short-toed Eagles in the interview which is available on the Medraptors Facebook page.

Three young Short-toed Eagles were tagged with transmitters when they were yet in the nests in Hungary, Montenegro and Italy in 2019. The eagles now are 2cy immature birds, still being tracked and their migration behaviour is of great interest.

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.

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.

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.

The following paper by Ivan Budinski established principles of the local Short-toed Eagle population monitoring program in Croatia:

• Ivan BUDINSKI, 2014 – Nacionalni program za monitoring zmijara (Circaetus gallicus) [National monitoring program for Short-toed Eagle] // Udruga BIOM. Zagreb: 10 p. – (Hr).

The author is one of Croatian researchers involved in the project of GPS tracking of Paško, the local young Short-toed Eagle. The map of the bird’s migratory movements is available online and regularly updated.