#perninae

[best-bird-tournament]

Tiebreaker: subfamily Perninae raptors

Which is the best bird?

Swallow-tailed kite

Black baza

Voting ended onOct 29, 2025

[birdblues]

Bataleur

[dendroica]

Swallow-tailed Kite (via USFWS Midwest Region)

Photo by Grayson Smith/USFWS.

[best-bird-tournament]

Subfamily Perninae raptors

Which is the best bird?

Crested honey buzzard

Gray-headed kite

Black baza

Swallow-tailed kite

Square-tailed kite

Black-breasted buzzard

Hook-billed kite

Voting ended onOct 21, 2025

[alonglistofbirds]

[832/10,977] Black Honey Buzzard - Henicopernis infuscatus

Order: Accipitriformes Family: Accipitridae Subfamily: Perninae

Photo credit: Charles Davies via Macaulay Library

[dendroica]

Oriental honey buzzards use nose and eyes to forage for sweet treats

In the winter, thousands of Oriental honey buzzards migrate to Taiwan to forage. These migrating honey buzzards especially target apiaries for a tasty treat not found in nature: "pollen dough." Beekeepers make softball-sized balls of pollen dough from pollen, soybeans, and sugar to feed their bees in winter when flowers are scarce.

The unusual appearance of pollen dough (bright yellow, perfectly round, and very unlike honeycombs or bee larvae) led these PLOS ONE authors to hypothesize that the honey buzzards might be using their noses (olfaction) in addition to visual sightings to identify the dough as food. Olfaction doesn't appear to be very ecologically important to other raptor species, so the possibility that honey buzzards use their sense of smell as well as vision to find food is exciting.

(read more)

[dendroica]

Oriental honey buzzards might stop to smell the pollen

Oriental honey buzzards, birds of prey, likely use a combination of their senses of smell and sight to identify nutritious pollen dough balls found in Taiwanese beehives, according to a study published July 15, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shu-Yi Yang from National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, and colleagues.

Scientists think that raptors, birds that hunt and feed on other animals, may use their sense of smell to detect food, but this has only been demonstrated in one type of vulture. The Oriental honey buzzard, a bird of prey in Taiwan, regularly forages in apiaries for yellow pollen dough, a softball-sized mixture of pollen, soybeans, and sugar that beekeepers provide as a supplementary food for bees. Since pollen dough is not similar to any naturally occurring food, the authors of this study investigated whether the buzzards identify the dough's nutritious contents using their sense of smell, or perhaps in combination with vision. The authors of the study used a series of experiments where individual birds could choose between two doughs that varied in pollen content or color, to test whether buzzards use the scent of pollen to find their food, and whether the food color influences their preference.

The authors found that buzzards almost always chose pollen-containing dough over dough without pollen, when the dough was otherwise identical in size, shape, and yellow color. Vision also seemed to play a role in foraging, as the buzzards preferred yellow over black or green dough if both contained pollen. In addition, buzzards still preferred pollen-containing over pollen-lacking dough when both doughs were black, but at a lower rate than when both were yellow. The authors suggest that buzzards likely identify the dough using their sense of smell, in combination with their vision. The authors conclude that olfaction is likely of far greater ecological importance to this species than previously thought, and should be considered when studying their behavior.