The nesting season is slowly coming to an end and the time has come for looking back upon it. While owls, for example, have already nested in the spring months, red-footed falcons have finished caring for their chicks just recently. But the time has no mercy.
Soon, the falcons will face a difficult migration to their wintering sites in Africa, which are almost 9,000 kilometres distant as the crow flies.
The nesting season was successful. “We are very glad that after many years an old nesting locality of the red-footed falcon in Slovakia was renewed. In addition to the traditional and in the long term single nesting site in the Sysľovské Polia Special Protection Area (SPA), this year we have recorded two pairs also in the Úľanská mokraď SPA near Trnava. In total, we managed to find 20 pairs, which produced a total of 46 chicks. It is the third most successful season in almost 20 years of monitoring. The positive result is based on the favourable weather and a sufficient amount of food (composed mainly of common voles and various species of insects) throughout the season. Thus the falcons were able to bring up their young ones with less trouble,” states Roman Slobodník from the Raptor Protection of Slovakia.
The experts ring the chicks of the red-footed falcon, so that they know their origin. “This year, we have observed 7 falcons, which returned to the Sysľovské polia SPA, where they had been ringed as chicks in the last years. The one individual, which was proven to be the oldest, was male. Based on the data from the ring, we know that it hatched in 2016 and that it belonged to a pair nesting in an old magpie nest. Our attention was engaged also by a male and a female of the Slovak origin, which came to like Hungary. For breeding they chose a nesting box, 6 kilometres distant from the place of their hatching,” added Slobodník.
Ten years ago, the experts worried that the red-footed falcon in Slovakia would become extinct, as there was not a single known pair nesting here. “Since then we have done a lot of work for its rescue. Our effort has been supported by the European Union for almost 10 years, currently through the international LIFE Steppe on border project. On the agricultural land, in the vicinity of its nesting sites, we have created foraging sites. These are known as field boundaries sown by a special mixture of plants, which create literally “the islands of life” in the middle of monoculture fields. In addition to that, we have hung up hundreds of nest boxes and provided for the protection of the colonies of corvids, as red-footed falcons naturally occupy their nests. The effort was worth it and the nesting population has stabilized. Thus, for now, we have managed to preserve the red-footed falcon as a part of the Slovak nature,” added Jozef Chavko from the Raptor Protection of Slovakia.
Illustrative picture: The chicks of the red-footed falcon (J. Chavko)
