Two Indian Spotted Eagles hold on at Hoskote Kere

September 2, 2026South Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests

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Two have been working Hoskote Kere, the old irrigation tank on the plateau east of Bengaluru, turning up on birders' lists over and over through the second half of August and confirmed there on the last day of the month.¹

Clanga hastata is a medium-sized brown eagle of the Aquila group and one of the more easily missed raptors in southern India. Some of that is taxonomy: it is closely related to the Greater Spotted Eagle and still gets written off as one in the field. Some of it is simply that a large brown eagle on a bare limb over a tank looks, at a glance, like any other large brown eagle. South Asian surveys describe it as globally Vulnerable.²

What it needs is an edge rather than a forest. Those same surveys describe it as an uncommon resident tied to wetland margins, hunting open ground for small mammals, birds and carrion, and Hoskote Kere has that structure: open water, a grazed and scrubby shoreline, and dry deciduous trees standing tall enough to sit in and watch from. The prey layer is there to match. , , and unidentified rats have all been logged in that landscape over the past month, along with an , a , , and toads and paddy field frogs after rain.³ Every one of those is an animal of open ground or the water's edge, which is the point: this eagle hunts things it can see and drop onto, not prey hidden under a canopy.

The tanks east of the city were dug and bunded to hold monsoon runoff for irrigation. The habitat is a by-product, and this is one of the birds that lives off it. Anyone going to look should scan the standing trees along the bund rather than the water.

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