HawkTalk Issue 90 Spring 2022

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HAWKTALK SPRING 2022 ISSUE 90

In August 2021, the team successfully tagged three juvenile birds, Arys, Anya and Timur. The project will take place over several years, with plans to tag multiple birds each year to gather as much data about their movements as possible. The tags use cutting-edge satellite telemetry technology to track the birds’ movements, give us multiple GPS points per day, and will last for more than three years. This will provide us with a wealth of extremely valuable data and information about the timings and routes of their migrations. Each of the three birds took very different routes after leaving their nests, with some surprising results! All three birds moved south initially, through Turkmenistan. Anya then popped into Iran and moved south through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into India, flying around 2300km. Arys travelled approximately 1500km, south through Afghanistan and Pakistan, and both birds ultimately concluded their journeys to winter in northern India. It seems Arys is quite the tourist, as towards the end of December he visited all three cities in the Golden Triangle in India: New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. He then flew over the India Gate and came within just 200m of the world-famous Taj Mahal! Timur, on the other hand, took a very different route, with an incredible 6200km journey in total! After leaving Uzbekistan and passing through Turkmenistan, he made a much longer journey further to the west with several stops, pausing in Iran, then continuing around the Persian Gulf through Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, eventually reaching Yemen in late November 2021. This was quite unexpected and a major finding for Egyptian Vulture biology, and establishes for the first time that the central Asian populations are connected to the western Egyptian Vultures that live in Europe, the Middle-East and Africa. As so little is known about central Asian populations, we are unsure whether birds often migrate as far as Yemen, or whether they would usually spend winter in Iran and Timur’s especially long journey is nomadic behaviour that is sometimes observed in younger birds. So far, we have learnt that the picture is much more complex than we anticipated. Although these three birds are just the beginning, the results from this ground- breaking research are absolutely invaluable for their future conservation.