Highland Foundation for Wildlife
Honey Buzzard

Out-of-the-Blue News of 21251

Yesterday, I received a telephone call from Malcolm Cowlard about a young honey buzzard from 2003, which he ringed and  I fitted with a satellite radio. It was at a nest in southern England and Malcolm has received details of a ringing recovery for that bird. Sadly, it's sad news because it is dead.

But there's an interesting story - see Bird E21251 - the biggest chick - it migrated across the centre of the Sahara Desert and my log for that bird reads as follows:

This morning, 13th October, poor quality signals came  in for a position in the Sahara Desert south east of Chegga, in Mauritania. This is 411 kilometres from its position on 11th so it is migrating steadily over the deserts in fresh  easterly winds. Unfortunately, the only signal received during the early hours of the 15th was  poor quality and no position was received. The bird was probably roosting out of direct radio view of  the satellite. Transmissions on 17th and 22nd were also of poor quality.

I have looked at the latest signals in detail, and conclude from the activity sensor that the young honey buzzard is alive but the battery strength is falling and we may not receive any more  accurate transmissions from this radio. No more news from radio which has stopped transmitting.

We heard no more until the British Trust for Ornithology received the following details: found freshly dead on a railway line on 21 August 2007 at Auffay in Seine-Maritime in northern France. This is four years, two weeks after it was ringed; so it did not die in the desert but returned successfully on several migrations to Europe, and may have even started breeding. But we do not know if it was breeding in southern England or was it in northern France. We will never know but this young honey buzzard, which crossed the middle of the deserts on its first migration, lived for over four years.

Introduction

Initial research on tracking the migrations of Scottish honey buzzards using satellite transmitters,  involved  two young in 2001 and one young in 2002,  as well as the adult male of all three chicks in 2002. These birds were from  a nest on FC land near Inverness and provided  very important information about the migration anomalies of young honey buzzards from Scotland.
The male wintered successfully in Gabon, and his migration was accurately monitored to the wintering quarters, while one chick was tracked to Morocco before the battery ran out. The other two perished in the Atlantic Ocean after making southerly migrations with a westerly bias.  Two young from southern England were also successfully tracked to West Africa in 2003. Unfortunately no suitable nests were located in the following years but in 2006 we are continued our  research on these fascinating birds and two young were tracked to Africa.
 

2007 has been a very wet summer and wasps were scarce - as were sightings of honey buzzards. In late August, I found one nest with a just fledged single chick - amazingly the parents were finding some wasp nests. Last year's nest wood was badly damaged in the winter; most of the nest also fell down; at least one adult returned and repaired the nest but did not breed. So there will be no tracking studies this autumn.