On December 14, 2020, the sixth monograph of the Migra program dedicated to the Eleonora’s falcon was presented in an event closed to the public due to Covid-19. The event took place at the office of Fundación Iberdrola España. The presentation was attended by: Fernando García Sánchez, president of Fundación Iberdrola España, Vicente Urios, professor of Zoology, director of the Vertebrate Zoology Research Group at the University of Alicante and main editor and author of the monograph, and Ana Bermejo, coordinator of the Migra program of SEO/BirdLife.
The sixth monograph of the Migra program, dedicated to the Eleonora’s falcon (Falco eleonorae), is entitled “Migration and spatial ecology of Spanish populations of Eleonora’s falcon” (Uriós et al., 2020). The authors are researchers of recognized prestige in the field of migration of this raptor: Vicente Urios, Ugo Mellone and Javier Vidal-Mateo from the University of Alicante; Pascual López-López from the University of Valencia; and Jordi Figuerola, Laura Gangoso, Juan Jesús Moreno Rajel and Duarte S. Viana from the Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-CSIC).
The monograph deals extensively with the spatial ecology of this peculiar migratory raptor, which breeds on cliffs of islands and islets in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, feeding during this season on migratory birds, and winters mainly in Madagascar. We present the results obtained by tagging birds with satellite transmitters in the Balearic Islands and Columbretes (Valencian Community) between 2007 and 2010 to study their prebreeding movements, migration and wintering areas, and with GPS recorders in the Canary Islands between 2012 and 2017 to study their movements during the breeding period.
