The gentoo harriers can travel more than 8,000 kilometers on their migrations from Kazakhstan to regions as distant as West Africa or India. During this migration, which takes them to such disparate ranges, these raptors fly about 250 kilometers a day in search of a place to spend the winter cold.
This species of harrier, which is bordering on the last danger of extinction, breeds between the months of April and August in the steppes of Central Asia. Then, the papialb harriers migrate to their wintering grounds, where they stay from late October to March. The destinations where these harriers spend the winter, according to research carried out by the Scientific Research Center (CSIC), cover a much larger area than any other similar migratory species, such as the Montagu's harrier , for example. This is the first time that the migratory lines of this species and their connectivity have been described in a scientific study.
CSIC researcher Fançois Mougeot explains that "harriers that breed in the same population, in central Kazakhstan, can spend the winter in regions as diverse as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia or India , including two different continents." This great geographic dispersion of individuals in their winter migration represents a difficulty in developing strategies to conserve this species, since they require coordinated actions in a very large space and throughout many countries.
Photo: Pallid Harrier
