A young
man named Fahd Qash from Saudi Arabia stumbled upon something unusual
while out on a walk. Strolling near a swamp, he spotted a dead eagle with a
tracking device strapped to it. Curious, Qash noticed that the GPS tracker had
an email address printed on it. It turns out that the device was fitted to the
eagle in Kazakstan as part of a study of the flight paths of Steppe eagles.
This
particular eagle was one of 20 that had been tracked since 2018 and the
resulting map of their travels is astonishing. Interestingly, they all appear
to conspicuously avoid flying over water, as the Caspian Sea, Red Sea, and the
Persian Gulf are all free from their trails. Earlier mistranslations of the
news caused some outlets to report that the flight path was for one eagle over
the course of 20 years, but experts have pointed out that this would be nearly
impossible. For one, the OrniTrack device the eagle is wearing was
not available 20 years ago—not to mention the lifespan of the batteries being
too short.
Despite
this initial misinterpretation of the study, there’s still plenty of
interesting information on the map. For one, it seems to indicate that there’s
a clear aerial highway that the eagles follow during their winter migration. As
one commenter pointed out, there would be plenty of drinking water available on
the steppes, hence there not being a need to fly over the sea in order to
hydrate.
Some
trails seem to fall off abruptly, which indicates that some of the eagles—like
the one that was found—died and stopped moving. To get a sense of how much
ground an eagle can cover in one day, a 2012 study by the group British Birds indicates
that they can fly up to 220 miles (355 km) in one day and are constantly on the
move between migration, breeding, and wintering.
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