© Universität Bielefeld
Buzzards, Goshawks, Kites & Owls
High-Flying Science
Join us on a virtual tour of our work with charismatic European wildlife! Below you can see pictures of how we ring and tag birds and of course of the birds themselves: European Eagle Owls (Bubo bubo), Common Buzzards (Buteo buteo), Red Kites (Milvus milvus) and Little Owls (Athene noctua).
- Buzzards
Modern lives in the Wild
Buzzard with wing tag © Universität Bielefeld Buzzards, eagles and eagle owls: these are the stars of a long-term research project aiming to understand life and death in wild animals living in cultivated landscapes. Why we need catapults, truck canopies, and your help in order to do this, you can find out here.
Have you seen a Wing Tags?
Have you seen or found a buzzard with wing tags or rings? Your sighting holds important information for us!
Please fill in our online-form.
Recently, we also started giving wing tags to Red Kites. We are very keen to hear about them, too! You can enter the Red Kites in the above-mentioned online-form.
© Universität Bielefeld Wing tags can appear large and cumbersome. However, we attach them in a way that is pain free and does not interfere with the birds? ability to fly. This is extremely important to us, as we want to influence the birds as little as possible. In order to research their lives and their performance under natural conditions, this is a central condition.
© Universität Bielefeld So, what about the catapult and truck canopies? The latter offer by far the best material from which to make robust wing tags which will stay with a raptor all its life. But how to get a wing tag onto the chick of a buzzard or a kite in the first place? Well, this takes some effort indeed. The nests are high up in the trees, making it necessary to climb them with ropes. You can watch how we use a catapult to get the rope into the tree in this short video, taken from a report by the local TV station about our work.
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld
- Kites
Top predators above the Teutoburg Forest
Kite with wing tag © Universität Bielefeld Raptors form a fascinating community in our environment. We research their interactions with each other, with us and with our change to our shared environment.
Red Kites
© The kites star in the prize-winning documentary The Year of the Red Kite. More about the movie and the Green Screen Awards.
The Lippe region is home to the largest concentration of Red Kites and a substantial proportion of the world's population. The Rotmilanfreunde promote the protection of this important species in the region.
We hope to also equip Red Kites with transmitters in the near future. This would allow us to understand how they use their territories and which aspects of their habitat is most crucial to their survival. Here you can follow other Red Kites on their migration South from Germany.
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld 
© Universität Bielefeld
- Owls
Eagle Owls
© Universität Bielefeld The eerie calls of Eagle Owls can be heard once again in the Teutoburg Forest. The return of this large predator constitutes a wonderful natural experiment. Eagle owls both compete with and prey on smaller raptors. We study the effects their return has on local buzzards and goshawks.
Little Owls
© Universität Bielefeld Intensified agriculture is currently challenging the hunting and breeding habits of Little Owls. These small birds need increasingly rare tree holes to rear their young and short meadows to hunt insects, often on foot. We study whether the reduction in Little Owl numbers has already led to a decrease in genetic diversity and how their population can be maintained.
- In the Media
"Number plates" on birds: why we tag Red Kites and Buzzards (in German)
(pdf)Why do we take buzzard blood samples across half the world?
(pdf)
Windpower
The construction of wind farms has increased strongly during the last decades. These wind farms are mainly placed in areas with low human densities, where they may cause conflicts with the protection of birds. Large, long-lived species like raptors are especially vulnerable to human impact because of their low densities and the requirement of large areas of habitat to sustain their populations. Moreover, late maturity and low reproductive rate causes long-lived species to take much longer to recover after a disturbance than short-lived species. In this study, we aim to assess the long-term effects of wind farms on the populations of birds of prey. Moreover, we will study which factors affect the collision risk, which is important to consider when planning wind farms.