Post-fledging Behavior and Outward Migration of a Hybrid Greater × Lesser Spotted Eagle (Aquila clanga × A. pomarina)
The palearctic Greater Spotted Eagle (Aquila clanga) and the Lesser Spotted Eagle (A. pomarina) are sister species that, as mtDNA studies have estimated, diverged approximately one million years ago (Seibold et al. 1996). The world population of the Greater Spotted Eagle consists of some few thousand pairs distributed sparsely over a vast area from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean (Meyburg et al. 2001a). The approximately twenty thousand pairs of the Lesser Spotted Eagle breed mainly in Central and Eastern Europe (Meyburg et al. 2001b). The ranges of the two species overlap in Eastern Europe, and the sympatric area covers a large proportion of the Greater Spotted Eagle's distribution range in Europe. Hybridization has recently been described in all countries in the sympatric area except Russia: Estonia (Lohmus and Vali 2001), Latvia (Bergmanis et al. 2001), Lithuania (Treinys 2005), Poland (Meyburg et al. 2005c), Belarus (Dombrovski 2005) and Ukraine (Zhezherin 1969). Keywords: Greater Spotted Eagle, Aquila clanga, Lesser Spotted Eagle, Aquila pomarina, hybrid, migration, satellite telemetry.
Journal of Raptor Research
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