Fact Check: This map shows tracking of 20 eagles over ten months period, not a single eagle’s travel path over 20 years!

A map covering the Middle East and East European areas with purple lines, purported to be the movement of an eagle, over 20 years has gone viral, once again among Facebook users. The social media claims say that the map depicts the fascinating trips of an eagle throughout different regions and boundaries and the tracker was installed in Russia.

But the claims are misleading as the real facts were lost in translation. In fact, the map shows the movement of 20 eagles over 10 months period in 2018.

Let’s look at the viral claims first.

Social Media Posts

The following is the text excerpt of the viral posts which claimed the purple lines were the paths a single eagle had travelled during a period of 20 years.

“This map shows the movement of an eagle over a period of twenty years.

The tracker was installed in Russia and finally died twenty years later in the Valley of the Child, Saudi Arabia.

It is very interesting to see how far this eagle has traveled in its twenty years of life and the great distances it has traveled in many countries.

Also, interesting to note is the way he avoided crossing the sea.

You can clearly see where the longest route was taken just to continue flying over land.

Many bird species spend their entire lives flying over the sea, but one thing is for sure and this eagle certainly avoided crossing the sea.

Nature is amazing ! ”

FB link | Archive link

Other widely shared identical content can also be found here and here.

Fact Check

The story is astonishing because tracking an eagle for a 20 years lifespan is not an easy task. Fact Crescendo team felt the viral claims are too good to be true, thus performed a Google reverse image search and performed relevant keyword searches to find out more details on this bizarre claim.

American wildlife biologist Dr. Todd Katzner, who led the study of how these birds migrated from Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia, had confirmed to AFP that each line on the map shows the movement of an eagle over 10 months periods. A total of 20 eagles were included in their study in 2018. Hence, each of the lines represented a single bird and the map was a collective of the travel paths of these 20 eagles under the study.

Dr. Todd Katzner had also mentioned that some of the 20 eagles died in the Arabian region or Africa, while others had come to Asia.

Elena Schneider, a Russian ornithologist who participated in this study, also gave clarification in her Facebook post on March 4, 2019 that the map depicts tracks of 20 juvenile Steppe Eagles (Aquila nipalensis) that were tagged in 2018 in Western Kazakhstan by the team of Dr.Katzner and Dr. Bragin. She also explained how GPS tracking technology was not available on this scale over 20 years ago.

The eagle in the photo represents an eagle who died in Saudi Arabia.

A person named Fahd Qash had found this dead eagle in Saudi Arabia and posted the tracker details in Arabic. One of his friends had contacted Dr. Todd Katzner regarding this find and Dr. Katzner had sent the image of eagle migration routes and explained that it was a map of 20 steppe eagles. An error in translation had resulted in the misleading posts getting created instead as a map of a single eagle covering 20 years! More on this on AFP report

However, as the social media posts claimed, all of these eagles had in fact avoided the major seas as shown in the map.

Conclusion

According to the above information, it is clear that the map purported to be the movement of an eagle over 20 years is in fact a collective of paths of 20 eagles which had been observed as a part of a study in 2018 for a period of over 10 months.