A female European Honey Buzzard was fitted with a satellite tracking system in Finland recently and was of particular interest to locals because it spent the most recent austral summer around the town of Reitz in the Free State in South Africa. She left Reitz to start heading north on 20 April 2015 and, yesterday morning, 2 June, she finally reached Finland where she will probably spend the boreal summer before probably returning again next season to visit us here in South Africa.
Here is an image showing the data received from the tracker which plots out the route that she took to head north... so, in just 42 days, she covered over 10 000 km at an average of more than 230 km every single day! Isn’t that just amazing...?!
