All species › Birds of prey › Hawks, eagles and kites › Crowned Eagle
Crowned Eagle | Stephanoaetus coronatus
Kroonarend | Águila Coronada
The Crowned Eagle is the most powerful raptor of the African forest: a heavy eagle with short, broad wings and a long tail, built to take monkeys, hyraxes and small antelope among the trees. Its legs and talons are, for its size, the strongest of any African eagle.
Voice
Vocal, especially over the territory: during the undulating display flight the male gives a high, ringing kewee-kewee-kewee, the female a lower koi-koi-koi. Young birds beg for months with a high, piercing kwee-kwee.
Recording: Jenny Sharland — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
80–90 cm, wingspan 150–180 cm; the female is clearly larger than the male. The upperparts are dark slate-grey; the underparts cream to rufous, heavily spotted and barred black. A short, double crest is raised in excitement. Yellow eyes and heavy, feathered legs with enormous talons. In flight the short, rounded wings with rufous underwing coverts and heavily black-barred white flight feathers stand out, as does the long tail with three broad black bands. The juvenile has a white head and underparts, pale grey upperparts and cream, faintly spotted legs; adult plumage is reached after three or four years.
Confusion species
Martial Eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus) is a bird of open country, with a dark breast, a white belly with small spots, a dark underwing and long, more pointed wings. The juvenile Martial Eagle closely resembles the juvenile Crowned, but has unspotted white legs, an unbarred underwing and longer wings with a shorter tail. African Hawk-Eagle is smaller, white below with black streaks, and has a white wing panel.
Habitat
Afromontane forest, coastal and lowland forest, dense riverine forest and wooded gorges, also large plantations and well-wooded suburbs, as around Durban and in Limpopo. It hunts mainly from a concealed perch, attacking prey such as vervet monkeys, hyraxes, duikers and bushbabies. The nest is a huge stick platform in a tall tree, used for many years.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
The wooded east of the region: the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Limpopo in South Africa, locally also in the Southern Cape; further Eswatini, eastern Zimbabwe (Eastern Highlands and the Matobo Hills), Mozambique, Malawi, northern and eastern Zambia and northern and western Angola. Absent from the dry interior. Beyond the region in the forests of West, Central and East Africa to Ethiopia.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On sunny mornings in the breeding season, listen over a wooded gorge for the ringing call of the male and then scan the sky for an undulating eagle with rounded wings. Good places are the forests of Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands, Magoebaskloof and the wooded gorges around Durban. Young birds can be heard at the nest all year round.
Conservation status
Near Threatened on the Red List. The species is declining through loss and fragmentation of forest, persecution by farmers who suspect it of taking goats and pets, and bycatch in snares. In South Africa it has proved partly able to adapt to well-wooded urban areas.
Scientific name
Stephanoaetus coronatus | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Falco coronatus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Stephanoaetus was introduced in 1922 by Sclater. Stephanoaetus comes from Greek stephanos, 'crown', and aetos, 'eagle' — for the Crowned Eagle's erectile crest. coronatus is Latin for 'crowned' — for the crest on the head. The specimen the first description was based on came from Guinea coast, West Africa.