Milvus milvus ... Red Kite

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Falconiformes or Accipitriformes
Family: Accipitridae
Subfamily: Milvinae
Genus: Milvus
Species: M. milvus
Binomial name Milvus milvus

The Red Kite Milvus milvus is a medium-large bird of prey in the family Accipitridae, which also includes many other diurnal raptors such as eagles, buzzards, and harriers. The species is currently endemic to the Western Palearctic region in Europe and northwest Africa. It is resident in the milder parts of its range in western Europe and northwest Africa, but birds from northeastern and central Europe winter further south and west, reaching south to Turkey. Vagrants have reached north to Finland and south to Israel, Libya and Gambia.

Red Kites are between 24 to 26 inches long with a 69–70 inch wingspan; males can weigh between 28 to 42 ounces, and females 35 to 46 ounces. It is an elegant bird, soaring on long wings held at a dihedral, and long forked tail, twisting as it changes direction. The body, upper tail and wing coverts are rufous. The white primary flight feathers contrast with the black wing tips and dark secondaries. Apart from the weight difference, the sexes are similar, but juveniles have a buff breast and belly. Its call is a thin piping sound, similar to but less mewling than the Common Buzzard.

Adults differ from juveniles in a number of characteristics:
- Adults are overall more deeply rufous, compared with the more washed out colour of juveniles;
- Adults have black breast-streaks whereas on juveniles these are pale;
- Juveniles have a less deeply forked tail, with a dark sub-terminal band;
- Juveniles have pale tips to all of the greater-coverts (secondary and primary) on both the upper- and under-wings, forming a long narrow pale line;
- Adults have pale fringes to upper wing secondary-coverts only.

The Red Kite's diet consists mainly of small mammals such as mice, voles, shrews, young hares and rabbits. It feeds on a wide variety of carrion including sheep carcasses and dead game birds. Live birds are also taken and occasionally reptiles and amphibians. Earthworms form an important part of the diet, especially in spring. As scavengers, red kites are particularly susceptible to poisoning. Illegal poison baits set for foxes or crows are indiscriminate and kill protected birds and other animals.

Adult red kites are sedentary birds, and occupy their breeding home range all year in the United Kingdom. Each nesting territory can contain up to five nest sites. Both male and female birds build the nest on a main fork or a limb high in a tree, - often over 40 feet up and beyond (to 60 feet!) above the ground. The nest is made of twigs and lined with grass or other vegetation and sheep’s wool. They inhabit broadleaf woodlands, valleys and wetland edges, to 250 feet or so ..... They are endemic to the western Palearctic, with the European population of 19,000-25,000 pairs encompassing 95% of its global breeding range. It breeds from Spain and Portugal east into central Europe and Ukraine, north to southern Sweden, Latvia and the UK, and south to southern Italy. There is a population in northern Morocco. Northern birds move south in winter, mostly staying in the west of the breeding range, but also to eastern Turkey, northern Tunisia and Algeria. The three largest populations (in Germany, France and Spain, which together hold more than 75% of the global population) declined between 1990 and 2000, and overall the species declined by almost 20% over the ten years. The main threats to Red Kites are poisoning, through illegal direct poisoning and indirect poisoning from pesticides, particularly in the wintering ranges in France and Spain, and changes in agricultural practices causing a reduction in food resources. Other threats include electrocution, hunting and trapping, deforestation, egg-collection (on a local scale). According to a report by the Welsh Kite Trust, the UK is the only country in which the Red Kite population is increasing. In 1999 the Red Kite was named 'Bird of the Century' by the British Trust for Ornithology. It has been unofficially adopted as the national bird of Wales. As of July 2011, non-breeding birds are regularly seen in all parts of Britain, and the number of breeding pairs is too large for the RSPB to continue to survey them on an annual basis.

Sea Eagle Safari

http://www.hurtigruten.co.uk/Experiences/Excursions/southbound/9c-sea-eagle-safari

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_eagle

A sea eagle, also called erne or ern - mostly in reference to the White-tailed Eagle, is any of the birds of prey in the genus Haliaeetus in the bird of prey family Accipitridae.

Sea eagles vary in size, from Sanford's Fish Eagle averaging 2–2.7 kg to the huge Steller's Sea Eagle weighing up to 9 kg. At up to 6.9 kg, the White-tailed Eagle is the largest eagle in Europe. The White-bellied Sea Eagle can weigh up to 3.4 kg. Their diets consist mainly of fish and small mammals.

There are eight living species:

White-bellied Sea Eagle (H. leucogaster)
Sanford's Sea Eagle (H. sanfordi)
African Fish Eagle (H. vocifer)
Madagascar Fish Eagle (H. vociferoides)
Pallas's Fish Eagle(H. leucoryphus)
White-tailed Eagle (H. albicilla)
Bald Eagle (H. leucocephalus)
Steller's Sea Eagle (H. pelagicus)

The tails are entirely white in all adult Haliaeetus except Sanford's, white-bellied, and Pallas's. Three species pairs exist: white-tailed and bald eagles, Sanford's and white-bellied sea eagles, and the African and Madagascar fish eagles, each of these consists of a white- and a tan-headed species.

Haliaeetus is possibly one of the oldest genera of living birds. A distal left tarsometatarsus (DPC 1652) recovered from early Oligocene deposits of Fayyum, Egypt (Jebel Qatrani Formation, c.33 mya) is similar in general pattern and some details to that of a modern sea eagle. The genus was present in the middle Miocene (12-16 mya) with certainty.

Their closest relatives are the fishing eagles in the genus Ichthyophaga, very similar to the tropical Haliaeetus species. The relationships to other genera in the family are less clear; they have long been considered closer to the genus Milvus (kites) than to the true eagles in the genus Aquila on the basis of their morphology and display behaviour; more recent genetic evidence agrees with this, but points to them being related to the genus Buteo (buzzards) as well, a relationship not previously thought close.

The origin of the sea eagles and fishing eagles is probably in the general area of the Bay of Bengal. During the Eocene/Oligocene, as the Indian subcontinent slowly collided with Eurasia, this was a vast expanse of fairly shallow ocean; the initial sea eagle divergence seems to have resulted in the four tropical (and Southern Hemisphere subtropical) species found around the Indian Ocean today. The Central Asian Pallas's Sea eagle's relationships to the other taxa is more obscure; it seems closer to the three Holarctic species which evolved later and may be an early offshoot of this northward expansion; it does not have the hefty yellow bill of the northern forms, retaining a smaller darker beak like the tropical species.

The rate of molecular evolution in Haliaeetus is fairly slow, as is to be expected in long-lived birds which take years to successfully reproduce. In the mtDNA cytochrome b gene, a mutation rate of 0.5–0.7% per million years (if assuming an Early Miocene divergence) or maybe as little as 0.25–0.3% per million years (for a Late Eocene divergence) has been shown. A 2005 molecular study found that the genus is paraphyletic and subsumes Ichthyophaga, the species diverging into a temperate and tropical group.