Moscow: A steppe eagle has nearly bankrupted a Russian bird-tracking programme with roaming text messages after it flew to Iran and began transmitting backlogged GPS data.

Scientists from the Siberian Environmental Centre were forced to turn to online crowdfunding, with donations flooding in since the story made the national news.

A steppe eagle flying over grassland. Credit:Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Named "Min" after its birthplace near the city of Minusinsk, the steppe eagle was fitted with a GPS tracker powered by a miniature solar panel in 2018. It is one of 13 eagles being tracked for a project by the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network to better understand what threats the birds face during their migration south to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Outfitted with a mobile phone card, the tracker takes an eagle's location 12 times a day and texts the co-ordinates to the researchers' number in four messages. If the bird is outside mobile coverage area, as is often the case, it stores the data to text once it comes back within range.