- The fate of an osprey that was tagged in Scotland and shot in Ghana highlights the dangers migratory raptors face far from their European breeding grounds.
- Researchers found strong migratory links between Northern Europe and West Africa by analyzing records from 257 tagged raptors.
- Habitat loss, hunting and belief-based trade threaten both migratory and resident raptors across West Africa.
- Conservationists say better tracking, monitoring, and collaboration between European and West African institutions could help protect raptors along their entire migratory routes.
In 2020, a juvenile osprey was fatally shot in Ghana. The bird, one of hundreds of raptors killed in similar circumstances across West Africa every year, had been fitted with a leg ring by the British Trust for Ornithology in Scotland the previous year. Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) were locally extirpated in Scotland in the early 1900s due to persecution, and the bird killed in Ghana was part of a population reintroduced to that part of the U.K. beginning in the 1990s.
Tim Mackrill, an osprey expert and director of the Scotland-based Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, said the bird’s death points to the need for a conservation approach that spans migratory birds’ entire habitat. “If you’re not thinking of the whole flyway of migratory routes, connectivity, and then where the birds are actually wintering, then conservation efforts for that species are really not sufficient.”
Many raptor species, such as ospreys, return to the same wintering site year after year. “They are literally faithful to the same tree, whether it’s in Ghana, whether it’s in Guinea, or whether it’s in Gambia,” Mackrill said.
Millions of birds travel from Europe to Africa each year, spending the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest months in warmer climates far to the south.
“People put a huge amount of effort into restoring raptors and protecting them in Europe, and that is a wonderful thing,” said Nico Arcilla, president of the International Bird Conservation Partnership. “But if all of that effort gets destroyed when they migrate and are killed, it shows us that we need to do a lot more in West Africa to protect them from this fate.”
In a recent study, Arcilla and her co-author, evolutionary ecologist Irene Di Lecce, examined records of Palearctic raptors — those native to Eurasia — that had been fitted with rings and documented in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, to begin to better understand their movements and better protect their nonbreeding habitats in West Africa. They relied on 257 records found in data published by Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire and Robert J. Dowsett in 2014 and 2019.
Two-thirds of the records for raptors were birds that had been ringed in Finland and Sweden, where many more birds are tagged and monitored than in, for example, Austria or France. More than half of the ringed birds in the data set were ospreys, with other species including black kites (Milvus migrans), and honey buzzards (Pernis apivorus).
Arcilla and Di Lecce say this helps to confirm strong migratory connectivity between West Africa and Northern Europe.
Justus Deikumah, professor of avian biology and conservation at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, cautions that it’s difficult to extrapolate the findings across the wider West Africa region given the small record size.
“I think it’s a good start for us to expand the study to other countries where migratory birds winter, for us to fill in the data gaps,” Deikumah, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay in an interview. “The findings will influence how we protect migratory birds and even resident birds in West Africa.”
Arcilla said she plans to conduct an expanded study using data from the Euring tagging database that compiles records from across Europe and West and Central Africa.
Protecting birds, wherever they are
Improving tagging and data collection of migratory birds is an “endless source of fascination” in itself, Arcilla said. But it could also enable targeted conservation. “Once we’ve identified where those birds are going, then we can focus efforts on the ground in those areas,” she said.
Both migratory and resident raptors face a range of threats in West Africa. Many species are hunted for use in belief-based trade, or face extensive loss of habitat destruction due to logging, the presence of livestock, and production of charcoal diminishing their habitat availability, Arcilla said.
Ralph Buij, a senior scientist with the Peregrine Fund, who wasn’t involved in the study, said European conservationists have a clear vested interest in conservation in West Africa.
“You might invest a lot in saving Egyptian vultures, but once they go to West Africa and get poached there for this market, for this demand, you also lose the population,” he said. “We see everything from ospreys to marsh harriers in large numbers on these markets during these surveys.”
Deikumah agreed that more conservation action is needed in West Africa, such as awareness education to reach communities that encounter migratory raptors. He recalled recovering a tag from a honey buzzard three years ago after it was shot in Ghana as it was believed to be killing chickens. “The hunter was not even aware that the honey buzzard does not even eat chickens,” he said. The tag showed that it came from Germany.
Mackrill pointed to the 2020 case of the osprey killed in Ghana as an example of how things can be improved. Following that event, the Ghana Wildlife Society did outreach with people in the area, many of whom were unaware that these birds are legally protected in Ghana.
“The death of that bird was sad, but actually a lot of good came out of it,” said Mackrill, who’s also the founder of the Osprey Leadership Foundation, an organization supporting an NGO in the Gambia that focuses on osprey conservation. Expanding these sorts of collaborations can help increase protection of migratory birds, he said.
Deikumah also recommended improving monitoring and tagging efforts in both Europe and West Africa to improve availability of data. “We should be able to establish our own ringing schemes here,” he said, adding that more scientific collaborations between European and West African institutions could help foster that and set up monitoring networks.
A summit on flyways, the global routes used by migratory birds around the world, is taking place in Nairobi, Kenya from Sept. 8-11. Arcilla said she believes her recent paper is an example of the need for greater support for raptor conservation in West Africa to safeguard remaining protected areas and address illegal killings.
“Those would be the two things that I would love more people at the flyway summit to know about and to want to do something about,” she said.
Banner image: A western marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus) in Germany. Raptors face a host of threats in West Africa, including persecution for belief-based use. Image by The Wasp Factory via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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Citation:
Arcilla, N., & Di Lecce, I. (2026). Migratory connectivity of Palearctic raptors in West Africa: Investigating links between wintering and breeding areas and conservation implications through ringing encounters. Environmental and Experimental Biology, 24(1), 73-81. doi:10.22364/eeb.24.11
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