White-eyed Buzzard

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White-eyed Buzzard
Conservation status
LC[1]
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Falconiformes
Family: Accipitridae
Genus: Butastur
Species: B. teesa
Binomial name
Butastur teesa
(Franklin, 1831)

The White-eyed Buzzard (Butastur teesa) is a medium sized hawk found in South Asia.

Contents

[edit] Description

Feet showing scalation.
Feet showing scalation.

A small greyish brown hawk, about 45cm long[2], the White-eyed Buzzard has a white throat, two dark cheek stripes, brown and white underparts, and orange-yellow cere. Eyes white or yellowish white, conspicuous at close quarters. A whitish nuchal patch and buffish wing shoulders provide additional clues to its identity. Sexes alike. Singly, in open scrub country. Habits: Affects dry open country and thin deciduous forest; avoids humid and densely-wooded tracts. Rather sluggish. Perches on dry trees, telegraph posts, etc., and swoops down on its prey.

Call: A not unpleasant, plaintive mewing, usually uttered when pairs soar in circles high up in the air. Often in company with larger birds of prey, silhouette, of the rounded wings reminiscent of the Shikra.

[edit] Distribution

The drier parts throughout the India up to about 1000 m in the Himalayas (scarce in the southern peninsula); Pakistan; Bangladesh; Myanmar[3]. Not Sri Lanka. Resident, but also moves locally.

[edit] Food

Locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and other large insects as well as mice, lizards and frogs. A beneficial species, quite wrongly accused of destroying game birds.

[edit] Nesting

Season: principally February to May. Nest: a loose, unlined cup of twigs like that of a crow up in the fork of a thickly foliaged tree such as mango, preferably one in a grove. Eggs-3, greenish white broad ovals of a fairly smooth texture. Both sexes share nest-building and feeding young; female alone incubates.

[edit] References

  1. ^ BirdLife International (2004). Butastur teesa. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 11 May 2006. Database entry includes justification for why this species is of least concern
  2. ^ Grewal, Bikram; Bill Harvey and Otto Pfister (2002). Photographic guide to birds of India. Periplus editions / Princeton University Press.  p. 203
  3. ^ Ali, Salim; J C Daniel (1983). The book of Indian Birds, Twelfth Centenary edition. Bombay Natural History Society/Oxford University Press. 
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