Amur Falcon Named after Nagaland District Reaches her Breeding Grounds in China

Kohima, May 28, 2019:

A radio-tagged female Amur falcon 'Longleng', which returned to the Indian sub-continent in the first week of May after completing her winter sojourn covering thousands of kilometers in African countries, has reached her breeding area in northern China, a Wildlife Institute of India (WII) official said on Saturday .

WII scientist R Suresh Kumar, who is currently monitoring the route of the migratory bird, said that she arrived precisely to the same location in her breeding site.

“A crude measure of the distance she has flown from her breeding grounds in Northern China to her wintering grounds in South Africa (after passing her various roosting sites in Indian sub-continent) since tagging is about 120,000 km .”

Longleng, a female Amur falcon (Falcon amurensis) named after a district in Nagaland was radio-tagged in October 2016 by WII scientists as part of projects to study the flight route of these long-distance migratory birds and environmental patterns along the route.

The bird arrived in India after her non-stop 4-day return passage from Somalia (on April 29) with flying at a speed of 45 km per hour from her winter sojourn in South Africa and left northeast India on May 6 for Myanmar way to her breeding grounds, the scientist said.

This is the third time Longleng reach her breeding grounds since tagging and it is approximately 937 days (2 years and seven months) of our continuous tracking, the scientist who has tagged more than 10 birds in the last 5 years, said. She will be at her steppe habitat for the next four months.

The previous two years of tracking Longleng arrived at her breeding site (in northern China) on May 30 in 2017. She will at her steppe habitat for the next four months.

The previous two years of tracking Longleng arrived at her breeding site (in northern China) on May 30 in 2017 and May 20 in 2018, he added.

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