The cages are all clean and ready, not an eagle dropping in sight from last year and the nice, soft nests made from garden bark and sphagnum moss are built,. The freezers are nearly full and I have arranged to pick up some haddock from M&M Spinks in Arbroath and some waste venison from Highland Game next week. My phonecalls in the office always cause a lot of laughter as people overheard me say ‘Necks? Oh yes they love necks, we’ll definitely have some of those’!
I’m flying to Alesund in Norway this afternoon to help collect our fifth batch of chicks over the next week. Every year people ask how many we are getting and the simple answer is ‘we don’t know’! We are licensed to bring in 20 each year, a maximum which means we wont be impacting on the local Norwegian sea eagle population and as many as our cages can hold. However, we only collect from nests containing twins, taking a chick and leaving a chick so as to minimise the interference in the adult’s breeding season and to increase the genetic diversity of the group of chicks we collect. Unlike golden eagles Sea eagles rarely have a weaker chick of the two so we just chose which one we take based on how many males and females we already have. The tricky bit is knowing how many chicks are in the nest before the long walk in or climb up a hill and tree! A lot of the eagles in Norway nest in broadleaf trees or may be far away on islands so it can be hard to see, that means we just don’t know how many twins are out there until we start walking into sites. We also like to leave the chicks in the nest with their parents as long as possible to give them the best start in life so try and squash our fieldwork into 10 days. In previous years we have collected the first chick around the 12th June, I was constantly checking my phone this weekend hoping for news. Finally Alv Ottar texted and it wasn’t good, Norway has had a lot of wind and rain making it hard to get out to the nests and also causing some pairs with smaller chicks to fail. From the 90 sites he and Ingar had checked it doesn’t look like such a good breeding season as last year when we managed to bring a record 19 chicks over. This isn’t a problem for the birds in Norway, they will be breeding for over 20 years so can afford some bad years, but is a worry for the project as we need to bring over 15-20 birds a year to hit our target of releasing 100 in total which will establish a healthy population. However, on Tuesday I received a text saying they had collected the first chick and had found some more nests with twins. We are heading out on a boat tomorrow to check a lot of small islands, fingers crossed for finding lots of chicks !
The last thing I did yesterday before leaving work was having a ‘GLOW meet’ via a webcam with Arn Gask School who are following our online education programmes, it was great to meet everyone and see their life-sized eagle they had made and thanks for all the really good questions! Apologies to Madderty Primary who had some technical problems so couldn’t join us.
2009 and 2008 birds are back up near Alyth with five being spotted the other day over Ruthven females turquoiseH and turquoiseK among them.