HawkTalk Issue 95 Winter 2023

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HAWKTALK WINTER 2023 ISSUE 95

More Egyptian Vultures monitored!

We’re sure you’ll agree that watching our Egyptian Vulture Boe soar high into the sky before diving back to meet our Bird Team in Reg’s Wildflower Meadow is a spectacular sight to see. Unfortunately, Boe’s wild counterparts are faced with much more challenging flights when taking the long journey to migrate across the continents. Egyptian Vultures are the only truly migratory vulture species in Africa and Eurasia, and we’re part of a ground-breaking project to study these migration routes in central Asia for the first time, finding out where they travel to and the threats they face along the way in order to develop measures to protect and conserve them. This year, we’ve made fantastic progress! The field team (pictured below) successfully tagged four more Egyptian Vultures this August – three more adult birds and one younger adult bird. This now totals 12 birds tagged since the project started in 2021 – an impressive feat considering the remote nesting sites located at great distances from each other. By tagging so many birds, we can begin to build a picture of where they go during migration, including where they rest over winter and where they feed and roost. The field team also found four new congregation sites during their visit in southern Uzbekistan as well as new breeding territories. Many different species of birds can often be found together at these sites, and these large groups feeding in these locations allow conservations to target their efforts here. Colleagues from Kazakhstan joined the field expedition this year and were trained up on tagging, identifying and ageing birds to hopefully help expand the project into neighbouring countries in the future. The importance of this work is highlighted by the devastating loss of one of our tagged birds, Timur. Timur was tagged in 2021 as a juvenile, and in previous HawkTalk updates for this

project, we described his epic journey through India past the Taj Mahal before ending up in Yemen, where he sadly died in March earlier this year. Due to unrest in the country, no contacts in the area have been able to recover Timur and his lost tag to determine the exact cause of his death. Timur’s passing is a devastating blow, felt by the entire team who have been monitoring his journeys across the continents. We don’t know if Timur took this route after getting lost due to inexperience, or if this is another common migration route that other birds take. Every vulture is vital to the continued survival of this Endangered species, and his loss is a sad reminder of the threats that these birds face. By tagging more birds, with both inexperienced juveniles and seasoned migrating adults, we can pick up individual differences in the routes they take, and therefore be better able to plan for their protection. We are excited to be able to share the routes taken by these four newly tagged experienced birds over the coming months.

Routes taken by tagged Egyptian Vultures in 2022