A raptor with a brown back and paler brown underside, distributed from Siberia through Mongolia and China to Japan.
Females are larger than males. The back and underside differ in the depth of their brown colouring.
A study fitted satellite transmitters to 22 Eastern Buzzards wintering in Japan to follow their movements. Among birds that departed from their capture sites, researchers recorded 65 northward migrations in spring from 2008 to 2016 and 55 southward migrations in autumn from 2008 to 2015. These are migration records, not a count of individual birds.
Of the 17 birds tracked, 10 spent the summer in Sakhalin, three in Hokkaido, three in northern Honshu and one at an unknown location. The spring routes differed. In the Chugoku region, birds travelled east along the Seto Inland Sea or farther inland. From eastern Honshu, routes to Hokkaido passed either via the Tsugaru Peninsula on the Sea of Japan side or via the Shimokita Peninsula from the Pacific side. In autumn, the buzzards retraced their spring routes; 13 of the 14 birds tracked through the end of southward migration returned to their capture sites. One juvenile spent the winter at a site different from where it had been caught.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern · Global
The 2021 global IUCN assessment lists the Eastern Buzzard as Least Concern (LC), with its population trend listed as unknown. Japan's fifth national Red List classifies the Ogasawara Buzzard (Buteo japonicus toyoshimai) as EN and the Daito Buzzard (B. j. oshiroi) as EX. These are assessments of island subspecies in Japan.