page_title: Steppe eagle
section_title: Breeding and wintering ranges
hierarchical_section_title: Steppe eagle / Range and habitat / Breeding and wintering ranges
caption_attribution_description: Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis) captured at Aliabad, Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan with Canon EOS 7D Mark II
context_page_description: The steppe eagle is a large bird of prey. Like all eagles, it belongs to the family Accipitridae. The steppe eagle’s well-feathered legs illustrate it to be a member of the subfamily Aquilinae, also known as the “booted eagles”. This species was once considered to be closely related to the non-migratory tawny eagle and the two forms have previously been treated as conspecific. They were split based on pronounced differences in morphology and anatomy; two molecular studies, each based on a very small number of genes, indicate that the species are distinct but disagree over how closely related they are.
  The steppe eagle is in many ways a peculiar species of eagle. It is a specialized predator of ground squirrels on the breeding ground, also taking other rather small mammals and other prey, doing so more often when ground squirrels are less consistently found. In rather treeless areas of the steppe habitats, these eagles tend to nest on a slightly rise, often on or near an outcrop, but may even the flat, wide-open ground, in a rather flat nest. They are the only eagle to nest primarily on the ground.
context_section_description: The steppe eagle once bred southeasternmost Ukraine and still rarely occurs as a breeder in southwest Russia from Stavropol to Astrakhan. The steppe eagle is still mapped to breed down to Makhachkala and Maykop to as far west as Leningradskaya, up north as far as the lower Volga and down to the Caspian Sea nearly as far as Makhachkala and south of Fort-Shevchenko.  The breeding range can extend through appropriate habitat in northeastern Kyrgyzstan and in much of Kazakhstan, from north of Nur-Sultan south to (albeit spottily) to Kyzylorda as well as around the Aral Sea, sweeping far to the east in Transbaikal and western Tian Shan, Xinjiang, Altai, Mongolia, the Gobi area, Gansu, Ningxia, northern Tibet (by far their southernmost breeding area), Inner Mongolia and reaching their eastern breeding limits in Manchuria and elsewhere in northeastern China. The steppe eagle is entirely migratory, wintering in east and, to a lesser extent, southern Africa. Their African range can extend western to southern Sudan, almost throughout east Africa, to the easternmost part of Democratic Republic of the Congo. The southern African wintering range extends to central Angola, northern and eastern Namibia south to Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and northern South Africa, including former Transvaal and northern Natal as well as rarely south of the Orange River In South Africa, steppe eagles are reportedly often frequent only in the lowveld of Kruger National Park area. The steppe eagle’s wintering range also extends into the Middle East. They occur broadly in the season in several central and southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula as well as regularly in eastern Iraq and western Iran with odd ones north to Turkey and Georgia. Although sometimes recorded as occurring “somewhat” in Arabia, more extensive surveying has revealed that many, if not more, steppe eagles wind up winter in the peninsula rather than Africa, and that the largest ever winter numbers were recorded in Saudi Arabia, where around 7200 individuals (or perhaps up to 9% of the current world population) were recorded near Riyadh. As many as 3000 have also been similarly recorded in the nation of Oman. Other nations to host wintering steppe eagles include Yemen, Azerbaijan and Syria as well as, albeit rarely doing so, in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Kuwait. 
  Unusually, a few overwintering steppe eagles have been now recorded in Kazakhstan, apparently near Shymkent, in the Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve, the valley of the Syr Darya, the Chardara Dam and towns of the East Kazakhstan Region. In south Asia, the species in winter may occur from Afghanistan (rarely wintering still in the Nuristan Province) and in much of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s Poonch and Jhelum valleys of Azad Kashmir are known to host a mean of 154 steppe eagles per study area.  In India, they may occur mainly south to Madhya Pradesh, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the Deccan Peninsula and Himalayan zone, Mizoram, Assam and southern Orissa. Vagrants have been recorded in India to Periyar National Park, Mahendragiri, Kanyakumari Wildlife Sanctuary and Mudumalai National Park. The wintering range extends east to Tibet (although the species is said to be gone from Lhasa in recent years), Nepal, Burma and broadly in east China from southeastern Guizhou to Hainan and southwestern Guangdong. Recent wintering records reflect the species as lingering seasonally at different points of the non-breeding season, albeit very seldomly, in central and southern Myanmar, western Thailand, peninsular Malaysia and northern Vietnam. The species may have been aided in expanding their eastward wintering range by deforestation practice.
caption: A steppe eagle flying over the snowy mountains near the Hunza Valley in Pakistan.
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