After spending just over a month in the care of SSPCA, the sea eagle that was rescued from the north Aberdeenshire coast has finally been re-released into the wild. This time, successfully! It was decided to release the bird in Fife in a brief window of good weather on Tuesday.
The bird had been carefully washed several times to remove the grease from his feathers which prevented him from taking off at the previous attempted release at Loch of Strathbeg. He is now in far better condition thanks to SSPCA and flew beautifully from the release site in Fife-he even gave us a fly-by a few minutes later just to show off! He's a very strong bird and I'm sure he will make great progress. His radio transmitter was reattached prior to release allowing me to keep an eye on him for as long as he stays in the area.
The wing tags used in Ireland are slightly different to the ones used here in Scotland-they have a different colour on each wing and you can read the tag from underneath aswell which is quite useful! Keep your eyes peeled for this bird in the skies of Fife!
This photo was taken last year in Ireland by Dick Coombes at Cape Clear.
Thank you all for your comments!
To answer your questions Mex, Claire is now Conservation Officer for Tayside and Fife.
The reason the bird was greasy was because it appears that he may have been feeding on something in this cove and got covered in some grease that had been washed off boats when the sea got rough. With his feathers coated in this grease he will have been unable to fly and get out of this cove, and consequently was unable to feed. There was a 200ft cliff on one side and open ocean on the other, so no easy way out! This is just my guess though, we'll never really know what happened!