In 2018-2019 we GPS tagged 21 Steppe Eagles in NW Kazakhstan, and later we tagged a few more that were treated in the Israeli Wildlife Hospital. The goal of the project is to understand the migration of Steppe Eagles, the threats they are facing and their response to human habitats. We also used the data to test the efficiency of the Eilat Soaring Birds Survey.
We so far published three papers:
Efrat R, Lehnardt Y, Bragin A, Bragin E, Avgar T, Katzner T, Sapir N (2025) Age-dependent response to anthropogenic habitat during migration of an endangered raptor. Current Biology 35, 4301-4308.
Efrat R, Lehnardt Y, Berkowic D, Leshem Y, Dor R, Bragin A, Bragin E, Katzner T, Sapir N (2025) Using GPS tracking data to validate the conservation value of bird migration counts. Biological Conservation 302, 110959.
Katzner, Todd E., R. Efrat, A. E. Bragin, Y. Lehnardt, E. A. Bragin, and N. Sapir. "Migration of first-year steppe eagles (Aquila nipalensis) from northern Kazakhstan and implications for conservation." In IV International Scientific Conference, pp. 310-317. 2022.
And we plan to keep working on the data, hopefully as part of a collaboration with other Steppe Eagle researchers.
Steppe Eagle
Tagging was done in Kazakhstan
