Issac Connie

Dr. Clark

Animal Life

The topic of this article focused on comparison of the diet of the crowned eagle

and the Savannah and the crowned eagles the south eastern biomes in South Africa. The Crowned eagle is a large raptor that lives in heavily wooded and tropical parts of Africa and also lives in parts of Guinea. The crown eagle’s diet almost entirely consist of mammalian prey and other types of reptiles.

The purpose of the study was to see if there was a comparison between in the crowned eagles in the wild and the crowned eagles in biomes. The first step that researchers did to collect data was collect pellets of the crowned eagles. The advantage of collecting pellets is it gives scientist the opportunity to reconstruct the skeleton of what the crowned eagle has eaten. It gave the scientist an overall conclusion of what the crowned eagle eats. The pellets were collect from 34 breeding sites in southeastern part of South Africa. Then they would make a list of what prey was identified in the pellets. The same procedure of collecting pellets was also done in the biomes. After analysis of the pellets the scientist had enough info for their results. In total 1804 prey individuals representing 14 taxa was collected at 34 sites. The results wereat the number of prey collected in the biomes was about the same as the number prey collected in the biomes. The analysis also indicated that hyraxes and antelope was the dominant prey of the crowned eagles. The crowned eagles in the study all nested in trees in the forest or in wooded areas in ravines.

Thearticle was very interesting. It gave a lot interesting facts about the crowned eagle. Though I never heard of a crowned eagle before reading the article, I was very fascinated with what information and facts I found. What I found interesting about the article was the collecting of the pellets in the article. That is very fascinating to me to because I like how something can be reconstructed after consumption. It sounds very nasty but it is very interesting to me.

Boshoff, A.F. Comparison of the Diet of Crowned Eagles in the Savanna and Forest

Biomes, South African Journal of Wildlife Research, June 1994, Vol. 24