The Central Asian Vultures Project team completed its annual fieldwork in Uzbekistan, tagging Egyptian vultures with GSM/GPS transmitters. With support from the OSME Conservation Research Fund and the Hawk Conservancy Trust, the team travelled during the last week of July 2026, joined by Nodirjon Azimov and Bunyod Ganiyev from the Uzbek Institute of Zoology (IoZ). We also welcomed volunteer support from Polina Smagina, who joined to gain experience in the tagging techniques used.
Setting out from Tashkent, the team covered over 3,000 km in six days of fieldwork, travelling across the Kyzylkum Desert in a UAZ field vehicle driven by Valentin Soldatov. This year’s focus was on tagging juvenile birds still in the nest. Including tags deployed by the IoZ team, a total of seven Egyptian vultures were tagged in 2026.
In these remote desert landscapes, Egyptian vultures nest in crags and holes on low hills and small riverine cliffs. The first nest of the season was found in the Arystanau Hills, just two metres above the ground on a small cliff face — home to a single chick, later named Soi. Egyptian vultures typically lay one or two eggs per clutch, so lone chicks like this aren’t unusual.
Other nests proved far more demanding to reach. In the Bukantau Mountains, several were tucked near the top of scree slopes and rocky outcrops, requiring careful climbing to access. The nest of Sham, for instance, sat near the top of a cliff and demanded careful footwork to reach safely.
Chicks are ideally tagged just days before fledging. At this stage they’re nearly full adult size (weighing around 1.6kg), though still in juvenile plumage, and once they do leave the nest they tend to stay close by. One of the risks of tagging juveniles this close to fledging age is that the chicks can sometimes leap from the nest prematurely due to the disturbance. Whenever this happens, the priority is to return the chick safely to the nest because if birds remain on the ground, they are vulnerable to predation. During this season we had two chicks leap from the nests, but the team moved quickly to recapture both chicks, before tagging them and replacing them safely back in their nests. Adults continue to feed juveniles for several weeks after fledgling, and it’s not uncommon to see a parent nearby during a nest visit.
This year, we located two nests which both contained two chicks. The first nest was in Navoi, located in a river channel and had two well developed healthy chicks almost ready to fledge. In contrast, in Bukantau, a nest containing two chicks had one healthy full grown chick and one underdeveloped chick that only weighed 700g. It is likely that the food availability in that area was not enough to support the growth of both chicks, but there could be other health issues we are not aware of.
This continued tagging effort and monitoring remains essential to conservation planning and has proved the only way to monitor individuals in the vast remote regions of Central Asia. A large enough sample size is key to drawing robust conclusions when identifying important sites, but it’s also important to maintain a sufficiently large sample size across years to monitor threats as they shift across space and time. Satellite tagging has proven invaluable for pinpointing these threats and causes of mortality in vulture populations elsewhere. This latest fieldwork brings the project’s total to 29 tagged individuals between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan since the beginning of the project with 18 active individuals still being monitored. Tagging permissions were granted by the Institute of Zoology of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan and a permit obtained from The State Committee for Ecology and Environmental protection of the Republic of Uzbekistan.
