Pallas's Fish Eagle

Pallas's fish eagle (Haliaeetus leucoryphus), also known as Pallas's sea eagle or band-tailed fish eagle, is a large, brownish sea eagle. It breeds in the east Palearctic in Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, China, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan. It is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. It is partially migratory, with Central Asian birds wintering among the southern Asian birds in northern India, and also further west to the Persian Gulf. The Pallas's fish eagle has a light sandy-brown hood and a whitish face. The wings are darker brown and the back rufous. The long, slender wings (particularly slender for a sea eagle) are rather dark brown underneath. The tail is black with a wide, distinctive white stripe. Juveniles are overall darker, cooler brown with no band on the tail but with several pale areas on the wing, including the underwing coverts and inner primaries. This results in underwings that have a white band in young fish eagles. It takes until the 4th year or so to obtain adult plumage. Among related species,, it mainly overlaps in range with the quite dissimilar much shorter winged and slightly smaller grey-headed fish eagle and scarcely with the larger, bulkier and much broader winged white-tailed eagle, which also seldom resembles the coloring of the Pallas's. This fairly large species measures 72 to 85 cm in length with a wingspan of 180–215 cm. Females are generally reported to weigh 2.1 to 3.7 kg, with this sample of nine averaging 3.2 kg, and are slightly larger than males at 2.03 to 3.3 kg, in ten that weighed an average of 2.6 kg. However, in some cases Pallas's fish eagles have been reported to weigh as much as 4 to 5.5 kg and span as much as much as 240 cm. Thus, their size falls just slightly under the large northern sea eagles (i.e. bald, white-tailed and Steller's) and broadly similar to slightly larger than the sea eagles of more tropical central distribution.