india

Updated: May 25, 2019 13:22 IST

A radio-tagged female Amur falcon, which returned to the Indian sub-continent in the first week of May after completing her winter sojourn covering thousands of kilometers in African countries, has reached her breeding area in northern China, a Wildlife Institute of India (WII) official said on Saturday.

“She arrived precisely to the same location in her breeding site (in the wee hours of) today,” WII scientist R Suresh Kumar, who is currently monitoring the route of the migratory bird, said.

“A crude measure of the distance she has flown from her breeding grounds in Northern China to her wintering grounds in South Africa (after passing her various roosting sites in Indian sub-continent) since tagging is about 120,000 km.”

Longleng, a female Amur falcon (Falcon amurensis) named after Nagaland’s district was radio-tagged in October 2016 in Nagaland by WII scientists as part of projects to study the flight route of these long-distance migratory birds and environmental patterns along the route.

The bird arrived in India after her non-stop 4-day return passage from Somalia (on April 29) with flying at a speed of 45 km per hour from her winter sojourn in South Africa and left northeast India on May 6 for Myanmar way to her breeding grounds, the scientist said.

“This is the third time Longleng reach her breeding grounds since tagging and it is approximately 937 days (2 years and seven months) of our continuous tracking,” the scientist who has tagged more than 10 birds in the last 5 years, said.”She will at her steppe habitat for the next four months.”

The previous two years of tracking Longleng arrived at her breeding site (in northern China) on May 30 in 2017 and May 20 in 2018, he added.

Two more Falcons-Tamenglong (female) and Manipur (male), were also tagged in Tamenglong district in Manipur on November 4, 2018. Unfortunately, Manipur was found dead four days later while Tamenglong has lost contact after reaching Zambia.

Reacting to a report of catching an exhausted amur falcon and it’s subsequent release in Assam on May 20, WII scientist said that he will find out from his friends in University of Capetown about the ‘ringed bird.’

The Amur falcons that spend their summers at their breeding grounds in northern China migrate to their wintering grounds in South Africa. On the way, they stop in north-eastern states and leave the region in November after having enough food for their non-stop flight.