From: bumeyburg@aol.com
Date: 2015-04-05 10:28
Subject: Very late spring migration of Lesser Spotted Eagles

Dear colleagues,

Our satellite tracked Lesser Spotted Eagles migrate very strangely this spring, see www.Satellite-Telemetry.de. Only two old females follow a rather normal schedule and have crossed the Bosphorus, but are still quite far away from their breeding areas. All the other birds are still in Africa, some of them even in Uganda and southern Sudan, where they are staying for weeks already.

Even if they should continue within a few days they will not arrive before May which means that they will come too late to breed. According to the information for some few other tracked individuals from Estonia and Slovakia they are also very late. It therefore seems that many of the LSEs from various other countries will also arrive too late for breeding which would have a great impact on the general reproduction success.

This has happened before in some years and we have already published about this phenomenon some years ago - see:

Meyburg, B.-U., C. Meyburg, J. Matthes & H. Matthes 2007: Spring migration, late arrival, temporary change of partner and breeding success in the Lesser Spotted Eagle Aquila pomarina. Vogelwelt 128: 21–31 (Heimzug, verspätete Frühjahrsankunft , vorübergehender Partnerwechsel und Bruterfolg beim Schreiadler Aquila pomarina).

For those interested in this paper we can send a PDF plus a complete English translation.

This year it is even worth and we would therefore like to accumulate as many data as possible on migration phenology, from both - tracked birds and observations at bottlenecks. We are also keen to gather information on the arrival at the breeding grounds and later on the breeding or non-breeding of the pairs.

Everybody is kindly invited to contribute to this important issue which may have a significant impact on the populations. We shall try to correlate the data with information on weather conditions in Uganda/southern Sudan and elsewhere. If we get enough info we will try to draft a paper and will also invite those who contributed significant information to become co-authors.

A series of articles is appearing on one pair of LSEs from Germany in a Newspaper:

http://www.moz.de/themen/schreiadler/

Both birds are equipped with the newest models of GSM transmitters. If you do not read German remember that it is now rather easy to get a rough idea of the contents by using Google (https://translate.google.com/). This  free online language translation service instantly translates text and web pages.

We also suggest that anybody with a special interest in this species subscribes to the mailing list SPOTTED EAGLES which is for free. Just send an email to  Spotted-Eagles-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (see below).

Best wishes,

Bernd and Christiane Meyburg


E-mail: BUMeyburg@aol.com
E-mail: Schreiadler@aol.com

www.Raptor-Research.de--
www.Raptors-International.org--
www.Satellite-telemetry.de



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