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Our sociable group of birds is beginning to split up again. After being on his own for four months bird T the male who was near Braco has finally been joined by bird 5 a female. The two have been inseparable for the last 3 weeks, flying together, showing talons and calling to each other so much so that it looked like love was in the air! However, it is worth remembering that they are only 10 months old and still learning their social skills. Young sea eagles will often behave like this with several different partners until they find the right bird for them and are not usually mature enough to breed until 4 or 5 years old.

In early February bird 5 also showed a lot of interest in a captive sea eagle being flown at a Safari park and spent a few days watching from the treetops. Without adults in the area, the young birds are extremely interested in any other large birds they encounter.

We have not yet had any reports of our birds fishing, but I was lucky enough to see 5 & T whilst they watched some fishermen on the river Earn (unaware they were being watched!) so it may not take long. As opportunist predators sea eagles have a very varied diet. In their current location, where they are surrounded by ducks, geese, swans, waders and rabbits they are finding easier things to eat.
Bird K has headed to Loch Tay and other birds are in the Loch of the Lowes area, where there is a fantastic group of lochs containing lots of food. Bird C has  wandered back to Fife, we still have a bird on the Isle of May and today I located bird 7 another of our females, soaring high on the thermals above Gartmorn Dam country park, near Alloa.

February was also a busy month for our field teachers visiting 12 primary schools near the release site to tell them about sea eagles.

A belated Happy New Year to everyone reading this. It's been a little while since my last blog and as usual the birds have kept me busy.

I arrived in the office on Monday 17th December to find my inbox full of emails about a sea eagle on the Isle of May in the firth of Forth, seen by several fishermen over the weekend. I shot off down to Crail and Anstruther to try and pick up a radio-signal, but only ended up with a cold bottom from sitting on the sea wall! Thanks to the SNH warden I was then able to head out to the island on the Wednesday to try and track the bird.

At this time of year the Isle of May holds large numbers of gulls and is covered in dead rabbits and grey seal pups, as well as some very much alive angry females who greeted us when the boat landed!

I had only 90 minutes on the island to try and find the bird and unfortunately was unsuccessful, radio-tracking can take time as it is important on a place like the May to cover every nook and cranny and I expect this bird was just sitting tight somewhere! Hopefully, I’ll pin it down this month.

Our group of six sociable birds (four females and two males) have joined up again after a bit of independent wandering with the birds travelling to Strathbraan / Loch Freuchie near Dunkeld and Glenalmond in Perthshire. Other birds have been at Monikie country Park and along the Tay estuary while bird F has moved south of St Fergus towards Peterhead. Bird 5, a female has also been near Balloch loch near Crieff mingling with buzzards and red kites.

Bird T who popped in at Argaty in November found himself a feast in the shape of a dead sheep near Braco. He is currently fairly resident between Callander and Braco, moving over an area of approximately 15 km. A few blog readers have seen this bird in the area and at Flanders Moss. I caught up with him last Thursday, being mobbed by crows and chasing greylag geese and Andy Hay managed to get this fantastic photo.

Finally, the disappearance and alleged persecution of a bird in the Angus Glens, which was reported in the press in December, was extremely sad for the whole project team.  The information regarding this came directly to Tayside Police and coincided with a cessation of regular sightings and radio-contact with this bird. The incident is currently under investigation, so if anyone has any information they think may be relevant they should contact the police directly.

Although it seems like a long way off preparations are already under way for the arrival of the next lot of chicks, some of the many licences must be secured annually and we have some more cleaning and disinfecting to do of the cages not to mention the huge freezer for their food!

Since the birds were released, we have been leaving food for them on a regular basis to help their transition into faring for themselves. This is what their parents would do naturally in the wild, leave food near the nest to help them survive the first winter.  This food dump was used regularly by a group of six of the birds, but they have recently stopped using it and the group has split up. Two of the birds have headed off together while the other four have gone exploring alone. We will continue to put food out once a week in case any of the birds need it, removing what has not been eaten.

With all the birds now being so mobile and dispersed, it can be difficult to say exactly  where the best place is to  see them,  as quite often when you try and catch up with them they have moved on!  However, bird T decided to be a little more obliging last week and turned up at the Argaty red kite centre, just 8 miles outside of Stirling. Head ranger Mike McDonnell thought something was up as the kites were behaving oddly all day. However, he soon spotted the sea eagle with a trail of angry kites after it! He wasn’t able to read the tags at first, but we confirmed the birds identity using the tracking equipment. After sharing a roost with the kites for the rest of the week, ‘T’ has now moved onto the Callander area.

Bird 1 has also been quite gregarious spending the last week only a few miles outside of Perth, I received five sightings of this bird in one day and Bird F is still up at St Fergus nearly 100 miles from the release site and I caught up with him flying over some geese on Tuesday.

Sightings of the birds have also made it into the press after one was spotted flying over the ASDA in Dunfermline and another was seen by commuters over the Forth road bridge!

You may have read in the newspapers that two birds have been electrocuted.  Although this is extremely sad for the project team, this is a threat that also faces young sea eagles in Norway with up to a third of deaths of first year birds caused by collision with power lines or electrocution. Transformers and power lines are a fact of modern life and are not a threat that we can protect all of the birds from, but we are discussing the situation with the electricity companies, to see what actions we can take to reduce the risk in future. The sea eagle population in Norway has also undergone a huge increase form 900 to over 3000 pairs despite these collisions.

Two of the birds are currently at Flanders Moss and three birds are within 15 miles of Perth. We also have a bird roosting only a few miles away from our Vane Farm reserve. 

The birds have been out for a couple of months now and are certainly making their presence felt.

For the first week or so after release the birds were all fairly sedentary, taking a lot of floppy, slow practice flights in nearby fields and woods. However, although the birds remained near the cages, it took some of them 6 days until they returned to feed, I think they were just enjoying their freedom too much! This behaviour is not uncommon, as released golden eagles in Ireland took 10 days before returning for food.

In the wild some paris of Sea Eagle continue to drop off food for their young after they have fledged, so I am mimicking this behaviour by maintaining a food dump on the roof of the cages. I can check with the radio-receiver where the birds are before putting out deer carcasses, as we still don’t want the birds to associate people with food or disturb them when they are loafing or feeding.

Like their wild counter-parts the young birds are showing a wide range of behaviour. Just 2 weeks after release two males headed north up the coast. Bird ‘N’ headed for Montrose basin, (via Monikie park and Forfar Loch) and as hes been there ever since he's obviously enjoying the wetland habitat and wealth of food and hes been seen eating a common gull. Bird ‘F’, the first collected for this project, has travelled even further North reaching our Loch of Strathbeg reserve on the Buchan coast in late September, he has since moved south and has been seen near St Fergus.

Six of the birds (4 males and 2 females) have stayed within a 10 mile radius of the release site, roosting there most nights and they are frequently seen sitting in the same tree, soaring together and showing talons to each other. However, these birds have been using the food dump less and less and are certainly finding food of their own.

The other birds have been making exploratory trips throughout Fife and Tayside and are particularly interested in the geese and gulls on the Tay as well as the Forth coast. One bird has headed southwest to Flanders Moss.

Any sightings or information on the birds’ behaviour is extremely valuable, so please email details to: eastscotlandseaeagles@rspb.org.uk

Its been a busy couple of days getting things set up for release and bringing up a couple of local people for the last feeds and it was a relief to remember where I’d put the hatch lock keys!

The birds have been stretching and flapping their wings for a little while now and seem eager to go.

We got into hides at 4am on the 10th August and Andrew went to open the hatches. We did this when it was still gloomy as we didn’t want the birds to see us and get spooked and not want to come out. It turns out we didn’t need to worry about that!

We opened two cages, releasing four birds, the first bird to go was number ‘7’ (a female) who ignored all the perches we’d spent ages building and just flew off with slow floppy wing flaps and without a backwards glance! The other three quickly followed, bird ‘T’ stopped on one of the perches for a quick breather before flying off and the others soon disappeared after them! Bird ‘H’ flew off with a bit more style, breaking into a glide after gaining a bit of height. It was an amazing feeling of relief to see them fly off and we emerged from the hides in a state of disbelief that it was all over so quickly.

Before leaving the wood we had a quick look to see where they’d gone, one had landed in a field and another in an oak tree. Its incredible to realise that with their small brains the decisions involved in flying and landing are all instinct.

Andrew and I came back in the evening with the radio receiver and aerial to check where they were roosting, we were driving up a hill about a kilometre from the release site where we planned to do the tracking and were shocked to see one of the birds sat on a stone wall next to the road! It flew off lazily as the truck approached sending up crows in its midst. The eagles were definitely making their presence felt.

The birds have been in for 5 weeks now and are looking a lot less fluffy than when they went in. Duncan Orr-Ewing, Justin Grant (RSPB) & Roy Dennis have come along to help me and Andrew fit wing tags and radios. I’m just hoping that my painted efforts look a bit better from a distance!

It takes about 30 minutes to process each bird, including taking biometrics (measuring different parts of the eagles’ bodies), weighing, fitting wing tags and radios.

The first big problem is catching the birds, they haven’t been handled since they arrived and are none too pleased to be handled. We put falconers’ hoods on their heads, covering their eyes to calm them down, keeping a tight hold of the legs and keeping wings in they are then carried into an empty cage where we have a carpeted table set up to do all the fitting.

We measure the feet, legs, wings and bill and then weigh them in a bag on a spring balance, before fitting the wing tags. Its important to use this handling opportunity to get as much information as possible about the birds, pre-fledging weight is especially useful and the biometrics help tell us how precise our sexing of wild birds is, as we know the sexes of ours from DNA analyses.

Fitting a wing tag is a bit like ear piercing, you need to find the centre point of a flap of skin along the wing edge, then attached the tag to this with a piece of wire and some washers. It is a surprisingly quick and easy process. The radio ‘backpacks’ took a little longer, they are fixed on via Teflon ribbon running in front and behind the wings and being sewn and glued together at a central point in the birds’ breast. The birds soon preen in all the ribbon and radio once they are back in their cages, leaving only a couple of inches of aerial poking out.

We managed to get all the birds done in 1 day. The big revelation was that despite the fact that some birds had been gripping on the front of the cages and flapping to get out for a couple of weeks, we found that they all had a little bit more growing of their tail feathers to do. So, I have a couple more weeks lugging buckets of fish up the hill to go yet before they can be released.

 

The birds have been in their cages for nearly a month now and are all starting to look and act a lot more like small eagles rather than big chicks.

For the first week the chicks spent all their time sitting on their artificial nests made of bark chippings and moss and then began venturing out onto their perches as they became stronger and more confident. The birds have a great view of the landscape out of the front of their cages and watch other wildlife with interest - in particular the many woodpigeons that frequent their woodland location. They have been alarm-calling at a nearby nesting green woodpecker and passing buzzards and ospreys as they fly overhead.

They then began stretching and flapping their wings, whilst over the last 10 days two of the older birds have been jumping up and down while they flap making a heck of a racket! All of the other birds are also starting to have some practice flights and hops around their cages.

All of the birds seem to be developing different personalities, they all reacted very alarmed at first whenever food appeared through the hatch. However, one bird has developed an aversion to the gloved hand, frequently stamping on it as we try and put food in as quickly as possible, not even being distracted by the food that's already in there.

Despite my reassurances to willing helpers that 'the chicks don't really use their beaks yet' one of my babysitters has nearly lost a glove and Andrew my assistant got a shock today when the chick ran down the perch towards the opening hatch and went straight for the offending glove!

One pair of birds also took a couple of weeks to settle down to feeding 'normally'. At first I was worried about the (smaller) male as he would not eat directly from the food pile but only steal scraps from the female's beak, turning his head longingly on one side as he watched her eat.

I tried to place the food in two piles to ensure he had access to it. However at the end of the first week I saw him pull both piles of food together and stand over them with his wings over his head so that she didn't get a look in!  After a few more power struggles, this pair seem to have settled their differences now.

I had a scare last weekend when one of the birds started making a small noise as it breathed, a visit from the vet confirmed that it and the other chick in the same cage had a chest infection. One bird was taken away for a chest x-ray but returned the next day and after a week-long course of antibiotics and fungicide tablets (inserted in food) both birds are happy and healthy once more.

Although I was very worried about them, it has been extremely damp since the birds went into the cages and raptors are susceptible to respiratory infections so it isn't too surprising that they got a bit sniffly.

After spending a week lugging 8 kg of food in buckets up a hill twice a day I’m glad that we only got 15 instead of 20 chicks this year! That combined with the constant aroma of fish that surrounds me I’m glad that I now have an assistant, Andrew Cole who also works for RSPB and other staff have been extremely helpful in doing the odd babysitting stint.

The blood analyses have revealed that we have nine males and six females, giving the Norwegians (who sexed the birds at the nest based on bill and leg measurements and general size) a couple of surprises as two of their ‘girls’ turned out to be boys!

The chicks first day in Scotland was a long one for eagles and Project Team alike. The birds were placed into large plastic pet kennels from their temporary accommodation in Norway before taking their first flight across the North Sea courtesy of the Norwegian Royal Air Force. 

For me, the day began preparing fish for their first feed! The birds’ introduction to Scotland was a hectic one being greeted by the press at RAF Kinloss and for ‘Orion’ in particular – named in honour of plane that the birds were brought over in – who was star of the show. The birds were then driven to their release cages at a secret location in East Scotland.
 
Each chick was examined and weighed by two vets to check that they were healthy and Blood samples were taken to confirm the sex, before being placed in pairs in the cages, matched up by size. It was gone 8 pm by the time everyone left, just leaving me to feed them some fish and lock up for the night. They suddenly seemed very vulnerable on their own in the wood.

Returning early to feed them on Saturday morning was extremely nerve-wracking as the birds had hardly eaten, but by Sunday all of the birds seemed to be getting settled in and were eating lots – they haven’t stopped since!