Little is known about the spatial use and migration behavior of European Honey Buzzards (
Pernis apivorus) in Germany. Looking at tagging projects in Germany, covering this subject, only one could be found in which German Honey Buzzards were tagged in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany from 2001 to 2011 by Meyburg et al. (2013). The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior started a tagging project on this topic in 2019.In this work, the data is analyzed for the first time with a special focus on the wintering areas. The distribution of habitats, their size, the daily distance of the forays, land cover, temperature and precipitation will be analyzed and compared with the situation in the breeding areas.Between 2019 and 2023, the Max Planck Institute was able to tag eleven Honey Buzzards with GPS transmitters. The data were uploaded into Movebank, an open-source platform for processing animal-related data. The statistical calculations were done to these data. Using the Environmental Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) system, the data could be assigned to environmental data and land cover, temperature and precipitation wer analyzed.The results showed that wintering areas in West and Central Africa differ from the breeding areas in terms of their distribution, size, number and land cover. Similar to the site fidelity during the breeding season, it was observed that Honey Buzzards return to wintering sites from previous years.The results provide initial insights into the characteristics of wintering areas going beyond cartographic localization. Regarding the still small data set, the results only provide an initial insight into the behavior of German Honey Buzzards.
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