Travaux du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle “Grigore Antipa” 67(1): 129-151, doi: 10.3897/travaux.67.e128641

Historical and current occurrences of Long‑legged Buzzard Buteo rufinus in Romania

Alexandru Cătălin Birău^‡, Andreea-Cătălina Drăghici^‡§, Dumitru Murariu^‡|, Cătălin-Răzvan Stanciu^¶, Dragomir-Cosmin David^#, Gergely Osváth^#

‡ University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania§ “Grigore Antipa” National Museum of Natural History, Bucharest, Romania| Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania¶ Oceanographic Research and Marine Environment Protection Society, Constanța, Romania# Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Corresponding author: Alexandru Cătălin Birău ( alex.offy@yahoo.com )

Corresponding author: Gergely Osváth ( osvathgergely@gmail.com )

Academic editor: Ionut Stefan Iorgu

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Birău AC, Drăghici A-C, Murariu D, Stanciu C-R, David D-C, Osváth G (2024) Historical and current occurrences of Long‑legged Buzzard Buteo rufinus in Romania. Travaux du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle “Grigore Antipa” 67(1): 129-151. https://doi.org/10.3897/travaux.67.e128641

Abstract

The geographic distribution of the Long-legged Buzzard (Buteo rufinus) in Europe has expanded during the last decades. The aim of our study is to (1) gather a comprehensive dataset regarding the presence of the Long-legged Buzzard in Romania, including all the available historical (i.e., before the year 2000) and recent observations (i.e., between 2001–2023), to (2) map Long-legged Buzzards’ observations, and to (3) show the occurrences of the species according to phenological periods of the year, in the different regions of Romania. Historical occurrence data are available from 1891. Using this data, we mapped the distribution of the Long-legged Buzzards between 1891 and 2000, and found that the species was present during this period in the similar regions of Romania as the ones from where recent observations were undertaken, i.e., between 2001 to 2023. However, after the year 2000 considerably more observations are available, indicating a potential expansion of the species and/or an increased sampling effort. Furthermore, contrary to the previous assumptions, our data revealed that the species is present in recent time in each phenological period of the year, that is, pre-breeding, breeding, post-breeding, wintering, in all regions. Overall, our comprehensive dataset may be the foundation of future works aiming to reveal details about the potential expansion rate, and the temporal and spatial distributions of the species over the last century.

Keywords

Buteo rufinus, Long-legged Buzzard, Romania, museum records, ornithology database, phenology, occurrence data