Steppe Eagle

Appearance

It is mainly dark brown in color with a longish but very thick neck and a relatively small head that nonetheless features a strong bill and long gape-line. It appears long-winged and has a longish and rather rounded tail and markedly well-feathered (almost with disheveled looking feathers) legs. The adult is a somewhat variable brown with darker centers to the greater coverts.

Published measurements include mass about 117.

Range and habitat

Although the breeding range is rather extensive, the steppe eagle is essentially confined to nesting in only four large nations: Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. The breeding range extends through appropriate habitat in much of Kazakhstan, from north of Astana south to (albeit spottily) to Kyzylorda as well as around the former Aral Sea. The species breeding range is also quite broad into Mongolia excluding the northern portion.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

The steppe eagle is sometimes regarded as solitary but is frequently seen in the company of conspecifics throughout the year. Besides the obvious breeding pair, they often flock during migration and aggregate in occasionally ample numbers during non-breeding times, usually at fruitful feeding sites, sometimes briefly cooperating with one another especially to klepoparasitize other birds of prey.

The steppe eagle, despite being one of the most numerous and widely distributed of all eagles, is exceptionally poorly studied in its non-breeding dietary habits. Steppe eagles are fairly different from related species, being rather gregarious and non-predatory while away from their breeding grounds. It is a specialized predator of ground squirrels on the breeding ground, also taking other rather small mammals and other prey, doing so more often when ground squirrels are less consistently found.

In crisis

In winter, though less closely studied than during breeding, the steppe eagle is remarkable for its sluggish and almost passive feeding ecology, focusing on insect swarms, landfills, carrion and the semi-altricial young of assorted animals, lacking the bold and predatory demeanor of their cousin species. Although still seen by the thousands at migration sites in larger numbers than other migrating eagles of these areas, the steppe eagle's entire population has declined precipitously. The threats to this species consist of increasing steppe fires and pests around the nests (both probably increased by the warming climate) that can cause a large volume of nest failures.

Rivaling these factors, declines are being exacerbated by disturbance and persecution by humans, as well as trampling of nests by livestock. Due to these and other reasons, the decline of the species is thought to be considerably more than 50%.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Steppe Eagle is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Steppe eagle, Wikidata item Q179359. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.