A busy couple of weeks!

People often assume that the work calms down for the project team once we are no longer tied to feeding the captive eagles each day, this couldn't be further from the truth with a total of 52 eagles to track and the sightings flooding in!

Every year is slightly different, some of our large females who had been bouncing around the cages looking ready to go for a couple of weeks before release, have been extremely cautious venturing only a couple of km from the release site and returning to the food dump (venison and rabbits placed on the roof of the release cages) every day, or spending their time flying together or simply standing around. One bird was observed perched on the same straw bale for five hours watching a farmer hard at work harvesting!

Of our two visitors from 2009, bird 1 (male) has now whizzed back up to Loch of Lintrathen in Angus after a couple of nights in North-Fife and is back with female, turquoise tag 'K', without radio-tracking we may never have known that he popped down for a visit and it is still a mystery how he knew the new eagles were out!

However, this journey is nothing compared to our smallest 2010 male, tag V who took only 10 days to reach the Farne Islands in Northumberland! Released on the 19th August he reached the Farnes on the 28th! Weighing only 4.1kg he is two-thirds the size of our largest female, but this didn't stop him making a big journey, since his arrival he has done well at catching his own food, first a shag, then fulmars and young gulls and is delighting visitors to the island. This is the furthest one of our eagles has flown immediately after release. You can view photos of him on the Farne Blog:

http://farnephoto.blogspot.com/

Continuing on the island theme, another male, tag L reached the Isle of May on Monday 30th August after being spotted off Fifeness on Sunday and undoubtedly geting caught up in the northerly winds! This is our third sea eagle to visit the island. I hear that he has been nicknamed 'Erik' by staff on the island and the May princess! And I'm told he isn't quite as bold as 'Ralf' keeping a lower profile around the island, but still being seen daily.

Photo below from Fifeness courtesy of John Nadin.

 Unfortunately not all of our young birds have been eating wild food with another male, after a visit to Loch Leven, tag Z managing to squeeze into a chicken coop and accidentally get locked in for the night in Fife! This was obviously a shock for those involved, but is an exceptional event and only something that would happen extremely rarely with young, naive birds and as the other eagles are demonstrating does not mean there is a shortage of natural food in the area or that the birds are unable to catch it, but we always see differences in temperament and behaviour between the young birds.

Sadly, one of our young birds (yellow X) was picked up injured on Friday and cared for by the SSPCA over the weekend, sadly it did not recover and had to be put down on Monday. We do all we can to keep track of our young birds, and to give them a helping hand by putting food out for them, but sadly, we do lose some along the way, just as not all wild-fledged chicks will make it. This does not make the death of any released bird any easier, having collected it from the nest in Norway and reared it for two months. We are extremely grateful to Susan Morris, Romain and Colin all at SSPCA who did everything they could for this bird and we're working hard to keep a close eye on the rest of the group.

The sightings have been flooding in and we're extremely grateful for everyones' support and enthusiasm and are working hard to respond to everybody, the geese are just starting to arrive back on their migration and this often means sea eagles turning up at winter roost spots such as the Montrose basin so we're looking forward to our eagles continuing to disperse.