10 November 2022

Booted Eagle at Judah – Bird record by Ed Blackthorne

Ed Blackthorne recently (end of October) saw a the below Booted Eagle near Judah’s Thumb. He has just sent me the photos and details and has kindly allowed me to add them to my website. Judah is between Dhahran and Riyadh, but is still in the Eastern Province where the species is vagrant with seven records. In the Kingdom as a whole it is mainly a scarce passage migrant en-route to Africa via the Bab al-Mandab Strait in Yemen. An increasing number of records in December and January, however, indicate it is now also a rare winter visitor, with the majority of these records in the northwest of the Kingdom. They breed from northwestern Africa and Iberia to Mongolia and winter south in sub-Saharan Africa and India.