The booted eagle (Hieraaetus pennatus, also classified as Aquila pennata) is a medium-sized mostly migratory bird of prey with a wide distribution in the Palearctic and southern Asia, wintering in the tropics of Africa and Asia, with a small, disjunct breeding population in south-western Africa.

The booted eagle was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2] Gmelin based his description on "Le Faucon Patu " or "Falco pedibus pennatis " that had been described and illustrated in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson.

[15] It was found in a study investigating polymorphism that these discrete colour morphs follow a Mendelian inheritance pattern, where the paler allele is dominant.

[17] There is evidence of a population which breeds in the south-western Cape region of South Africa, arriving in early August, laying eggs in September, and leaving in March of the following year.

The third group is a non-breeding population thought to migrate south from Eurasia and North Africa in summer, however no empirical evidence of this has been documented.

In South Africa, booted eagles also occur in hilly and open landscapes and in contrast to their Northern Hemisphere conspecifics, typically breed strictly on rocky cliffs in ravines and gorges.

It has been suggested that frogs comprise an important part of the booted eagle diet, however this has not been observed in the Southern African populations.

[16] The population of eagles which breed in the Cape region of South Africa typically do so shortly after arriving in August.

The breeding pairs nest on cliff ledges, this is one of the ways in which this population differs to the Palearctic booted eagles.

[20] It was found in a study conducted in South Africa that typical to the species, booted eagles nested on cliffs at an average height of 60m.

The clutch size was also comparable with Palearctic populations, with pairs generally successfully raising two chicks according to existing evidence.

The Southern African populations were relatively recently discovered in the 1980s, possibly suggesting that they migrated due to changing climate and environmental conditions.

[17] It is also thought that this species has been overlooked in Southern Africa due to the remote and discrete nature of their nesting sites.