HawkTalk Issue 92 Winter 2022

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HAWKTALK WINTER 2022 ISSUE 92

This year, the project continues with more exciting updates. The field team visited the desert in central Uzbekistan in July 2022 to tag five more Egyptian Vultures; there are now eight birds with satellite tags. These birds will start to build an understanding of the migration routes for this important population. The first bird for 2022 is a 5-year-old Egyptian Vulture adult female, named Sofia by the team. Sofia was caught on a dump site near the town of Kitab; the field team recorded more than 200 vultures at the dump site! Sofia was fitted with a GPS-satellite tag on a backpack harness and released back where she was found. Sofia is the first-ever adult Egyptian Vulture to be tagged in central Asia. Four more birds were fitted with tags, including Guzar, a 3-year-old male, Hissar, a 2-year-old male, Johnny, a 4-year-old male and Shirin, a 2-year-old female. Juvenile Egyptian vultures (shown far left) maintain a brown plumage for five years before moulting into their adult white feathers. Sophia (shown bottom left) is a little grubby from being rummaging around in the dump site compared to the usual white plumage seen on our lovely Boe here at the Trust (shown bottom right). We suspect that over time they will establish their migration patterns, so catching and tagging adults can give us new information on the movements, requirements and threats faced by this species. The team, Vladimir Dobrev, Anna Ten, Valentine Soldatov and Dobromir Dobrev (shown at the bottom of the left hand page), all put a huge effort into safely capturing and tagging the five birds and surveying rubbish dumps in central Uzbekistan. We look forward to seeing what new information the five new vultures will give us in the coming years.