Steppe eagle

Appearance

The steppe eagle is a large, bulky and robust-looking eagle. It is mainly dark brown in colour 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 legs.

Habitat

The steppe eagle tends to breeds in open dry country, within the characteristic habitat it is named after: the steppe both in both upland and lowland areas. In Kazakhstan, it is known to generally occur in drier parts of the steppe than some other raptors like harriers. This species generally avoids utilizing agricultural land such as arables and most other human-fragmented areas, however, they can be somewhat tolerant of nesting near roads. Associated habitats are frequented when breeding such as flat plains, arid grassland, semi-desert and even desert edge. Most members of the species breed at lower levels but largely in eastern part of the range also will nest in poorly vegetated dry rocky hillsides such as granite massifs and upland valleys, though generally avoid truly mountainous areas. Wintering steppe eagles often occur much more frequently in human-modified areas in order to access easy foods. These include landfills and livestock carcass dumps, these being used frequently everywhere from Arabia to India. More natural habitats used most often by wintering steppe eagles tend to be various wetlands or other waterways where they are available. In winter, mostly savanna and grasslands are the predominant habitat used in Africa, also sometimes dry woodland. Study in Botswana indicated that wintering steppe eagles there appeared to be indifferent to land use changes by humans. In Zambia and Malawi, it was found that the steppe eagle was only frequent in high-elevation plateau areas from 370 to 2,400 m metres above sea level. Use of plateaus was also frequent in Zimbabwe, often where open savanna woods of "Acacia" stand as well as the use of cultivated areas such as wheat stubble fields by eagles. Iraqi wintering steppe eagles often used dump sites as well as deserts and semi-arid areas, with more steppe, other grassland and mountain slopes used in northern Iraq in winter. In Armenia steppe eagles are apparently frequent in old fields and orchards. In south Asia they usually use open country and often frequents large lakes and other wetlands near arid areas but may accept, or even prefer, more heavily wooded areas. Although usually a breeder of lowlands, it has been known to live at elevations of up to 2,300 m and locally to 3,000 m in mountains, on passage can occur to over 4,500 m sometimes even to 7,925 m, as was recorded on Mount Everest. Compared to other Palearctic migrating eagles, the steppe eagle seems to perhaps be slightly more tolerant of a wider range of climatic conditions, including rather humid conditions in India provided subsistence is available as well as up to 50 cm of snow cover in Kazakhstan.

Reproduction

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. However, the steppe eagle once bred in Europe. Here, they bred into the 20th century in at least southeasternmost Ukraine and perhaps elsewhere in eastern Europe.

Food

The steppe eagle is an opportunistic predator like other "Aquila" eagles but has a number of dietary and foraging peculiarities. They prey mainly on small-sized mammals, with some birds and reptiles and frequently insects and carrion. Despite their opportunistic nature, the steppe eagle is a somewhat specialized predator on particular mammals such as ground squirrels while breeding and, during non-breeding times, feeds on various foods but is often peculiarly narrow in dietary selection, preferring massed food sources that require little effort for them to obtain. Various other small or medium-sized mammals can become the most significant prey locally on the breeding grounds, such as voles, pikas and zokors and, generally more secondarily, marmots, hares, gerbils, hedgehogs and others.