Iain who wrote the last blog post has been snowed in at Vane Farm for the past week, you can see some photos of the reserve here:
http://www.rspb.org.uk/community/groups/vanefarm/media/default.aspx
We were down to only stocking the food dump once a week as the eagles were mainly catching their own food and leaving most of the venison for the crows and magpies and we haven’t been able to get up to the wood at all in the last week due to the snow and ice.
As the colder weather has set in I wanted to see how yellow3 our rehabilitated female is getting on and spent some time watching her, I found her in a tall scots pine overlooking a flooded field where she perched for over an hour watching the ducks below before swooping down and catching a teal, which she took to a drier bit corner of the field to eat, its great to see her in such great condition and reassured me that she isn’t relying on the food dump and that her time in captivity hadn’t removed her wild behaviour.
Another female, YellowC who was last spotted in Glen eagles at the start of November has just been spotted at Loch Scridan on Mull with some other juveniles.
With the help of volunteer Dan Spinks we’ve been pinning down a new communal roost site near Fettercairn in Aberdeenshire, this involves getting out with the radio-tracking gear at either end of the day (when the eagles are either leaving or arriving at the roost) and trying to get enough bearing on their signals from different hill tops to get the location pinned down. Once you’ve doen that you often end up with an are of up to a 1km square of woodland to check and have to try and see the birds go in or walk through the wood until you signs of the birds, feathers pellets and droppings. Another good clue with sea eagles is that they really like to have a view of water it can be the coast, a river or just a small lochan. There have been 2008 and 2009 birds roosting there since October, up to 6 at a time and its incredible to think that this is probably the first time theres been a sea eagle roost site in this part of the country for hundreds of years. When I went up at the end of November to check which birds were suing the site I was amazed to see (and hear with the tracking gear) that yellowO had joined the others. He is the smaller male sibling of yellowE a female, who has been in the north-east since early September often popping into Meikle Loch. This is the first time he has moved more than a few miles from the release site in Fife, where he was the regular under-dog at the food dump. I wonder if he will keep moving north-east and find his sibling again or whether he’ll stay put over the winter?