Seventeen years ago when the first white-tailed sea eagles landed from Norway at Kerry Airport in Farranfore, they were met with placards and protests. Farmers feared their lambs would be plucked from the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks by the return of the biggest birds of prey in Ireland.
Now, some of those very same farmers are not just supporting the project but are hosting the latest arrivals and offering to help the National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) in the latest reintroduction.
It is a turnaround that tickles Dr Philip Buckley of the NPWS, the southwest region division manager who is very dedicated to the eagle project.
While the early years saw poisonings and a shooting, guardianship is the prevailing attitude now, he says.
“Farmers are incredibly supportive now,” says Buckley. He gives an anecdote of coming across one farmer who he remembered from the 2007 protest recently on land adjacent to a holding pen, now offering to do anything he could to help.
The eagles are not partial to newborn Mangerton lamb, after all. Top predators, they will eat “basically anything” and carrion is a favourite.
The eagles are fitted with satellite tags and monitored on a daily basis. Sometimes they will show no movement, but more often than not, this is because the massive birds weighing more than 6kg have found enough rations to keep them in the one place for days.
Then there is fish. The eagles fish on lakes and coasts and their 8ft wingspan is a delight for tourists at the Gap of Dunloe.
Some 27 birds were brought in this year on a specially chartered flight from Norway.
They are in holding sites from the Killarney National Park and the Lower Shannon estuary near Tarbert to Lough Corrib.
The project requires considerable logistics and up to 50 people are involved for the summer, including NPWS rangers and part-time staff.
“It’s a big operation. But there is a system now and it is running and swings into place not just for the eagles but for ospreys too,” Buckley says, referring to the NPWS’s latest reintroduction programme, which is built on the eagle expertise.
This was a good year for sea eagles in Norway and some 30 per cent of nests in the Trondheim area had two or more chicks.
Chicks are only taken from nests where there is more than one chick; the nests are identified and the chicks taken when they are mature enough, Buckley explains.
Shootings and poisonings of the birds led to their disappearance in the first place but they are only one part of the picture.
Storm Ophelia, which hit in October 2017, shook the nests out of the trees. Avian flu snatched two of the most experienced breeding pairs in Lough Derg.
Nonetheless, satellite tagging shows eagles dotted all over the island of Ireland now, and Ireland’s white-tailed sea eagle project is highly regarded in international bird circles, Buckley says.
The project is a joint initiative between the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Golden Eagle Trust in collaboration with the NorskInstitutt for Naturforskning (NINA) and the Norwegian Ornithological Society.
Within Ireland vast experience has been built up over the last 17 years and the eagle project paved the way for last year’s reintroduction of the osprey. This is a migratory bird, unlike the eagle, and it had been 200 years since it bred here.
After nine osprey chicks were released in Co Waterford last year, about 50 ospreys were introduced here over a five-year period, again with the NPWS benefiting from Norwegian partnership.
It was a dream of the late Charles Haughey to reintroduce the white-tailed sea eagle. Documents held in Ionad an Bhlascaoid in west Kerry detail his contacts with the Golden Eagle Trust as well as the introduction, for a while, of a pair of eagles to Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, his Blasket Island. Maeve survived for a few years but the smaller Aillil, the male, died, perhaps mobbed by crows.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service reintroduction programme began in 2007 in the Killarney National Park with the Golden Eagle Trust under the direction of Dr Allen Mee, who was involved in the condor project in the US.
The reintroduction programme resumed in 2020 because the population was considered to be still vulnerable. The chicks are kept in aviaries until released – it is four years before they grow their white tail.
Hosting the eagles on his land near the Limerick border, dairy farmer Shane Wall says it is a fantastic project to be involved in.
“When they release them, we have the beauty of them for several months. Usually until around Christmas and then they leave,” he says.
He was not one of the protesters in Farranfore but remembers the alarm, particularly among sheep farmers concerned about their lands.
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