As the days start to get shorter its time for our released birds to start dispersing and older birds to be on the move again, taking an interesting in the building geese flocks. Well...this is the theory, 6 of our 2009 birds (3 males and 3 females) have got other ideas, still roosting and feeding in the release wood and spending lazy days flying together and showing talons, looking amused at angry kestrels buzzing them as they perch in the trees and occasionally turning round to snap at a buzzard chasing them in flight. It is a privilege to hear them calling at each other before roosting at night when putting deer on the food dump andon Tuesday I watched as a large female ‘H’ knocked a smaller male ‘Z’ off its perch on a small Scots pine branch! One of our local group's favorite spots is a large rabbit warren and I was amazed to see a fox appear from its nearby den completely unawares of the four large eagles who were very interested in its progress, once it realised it was being watched it was well out in the open and had no choice but to keep going but soon started trotting off after tag V (a male) took a couple of low swoops at it!.
Some eagles have taken an interest in the geese, tag 0 (female) has been at the Eden estuary this week and two eagles were spotted of the Isle of May at the end of September in hot pursuit of some pink-footed geese.
Our 2008 male, ‘Ralf’ has just celebrated a year in the north east of Scotland and can still be seen regularly at Loch of Strathbeg.
There are a lot of differences between individual eagles and their behavior each year and sadly this year has seen a higher number of casualties with a further 2 eagles lost, a male was the victim of a train collision near Lunan bay and a female collided with some overhead wires in Fife. Our survival rates are still in line with those of the west coast releases, but sadly this doesn’t make picking up dead birds any easier.
Another male, ‘P’ has made it up to near Killiecrankie in Perthshire whilst the remaining 2009 birds are still mixing with our 2008 birds on the north of the Tay and we received reports of a 2008 Irish released bird in Aberdeenshire in the last month. Whilst two of our 2007 males are currently in Mid-lothian.
Hi Sooty,
Thanks so much for your support. It does take a long time to re-introduce a long-lived and slow-breeding bird like white-tailed eagles as they have to survive until 5 or older until they start breeding and your numbers for the West coast are right, with only a third of released birds reaching breeding age. However, once you get 2nd or 3rd generation birds the population does take off.
We have done some work already with Scottish Power around the release site to address the electrocution issue and have been speaking to Birdlife partners in Germany who have done a lot of work in this area.
We are pleased with how the project is going so far and our survival rates, and this is why we have to release so many eagles, but it can can sometimes just be very bad luck to get so many casualties in a short space of time and it is hard when you've collected the chick from the nest and fed it everyday for 2 months! Following the eagles with radio-tracking does mean we have a better idea of how many birds are dying and why. I'm hoping the next couple of months will be a bit quieter! I was watching tags 8 and H playing together in the wind this morning and that certainly raised my spirits as well as arriving in the office to see more excited emails from people spotting the birds.