SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLE: POPULATION IN 2013

Photo Pedro Schreur y Godfried Schreur

Keeping our promise we can provide yet another year’s update on the population of the Spanish Imperial Eagle (Aquila adalberti) in the Iberian peninsular and in Extremadura. On this occasion the official data has been published much earlier than usual and has been covered extensively in the press.

Overall, it has been yet again another excellent season for the species, with a new record of 407 pairs in the peninsular (396 in Spain and 11 in Portugal), 27 more than the previous year, an increase of 7.5%.

Apart from in Extremadura, where there has been a small decrease of three pairs, and in Castilla y León, the population of Spanish Imperial Eagle has increased in all of the other autonomous communities of Spain, especially in Castilla-La Mancha and in Andalucia. Extremadura continues to be the region with the slowest increase of Spanish Imperial Eagle, from being second position in 1999 to the penultimate in 2013. In these 15 years of exhaustive monitoring, the population has multiplied three-fold across Spain, but only by 1.5 times in Extremadura. In comparison, in Castilla – La Mancha the population has risen by more than four times, and around 3.5 times in Castilla y León and Andalucia. Madrid for its part has doubled its figures, whilst in Portugal the population has grown from a single pair in 2003 to 11 pairs ten years later. Almost certainly, the different trends shown are closely related to the conservation status of rabbit populations.