As part of the ambitious effort to reintroduce the sea eagle to the coasts of Co Kerry, ALLAN MEEtravelled to wildest Norway to seek suitable chicks to bring back to Ireland to breed.
IT IS A SWELTERING summer’s day in western Norway. High up in a big spruce tree, two well-grown white-tailed sea eagle chicks sit panting heavily in their big nest, trying to find some shade from the midsummer sun. Below, we prepare to climb the tree to collect one of the chicks to add to our collection of birds bound for Co Kerry. After climbing to the nest, we share the confined space with two rather alarmed eagle chicks. We take measurements of both chicks to decide which to take. Sea eagles are sexually dimorphic, females are significantly bigger than males. We need a male from this last nest so we take the smaller chick, lowering it to the ground in a bag on the end of a rope. It’s an undignified exit from its home, but the start of a new phase in its life that will, we hope, see eagle number 20 fly free in Kerry and contribute to efforts to restore this magnificent species to Ireland.
White-tailed sea eagles, once our largest bird of prey, were widespread in coastal areas in the west of Ireland before being driven to extinction following centuries of human hostility. Place-names containing the Irish word for eagle, “iolar”, or anglicised derivations, suggest a long historical association between man and eagles. Examples from Kerry include Beenanillar Head (mountain of the eagle) on Valentia, and Cloghananillar (stony place of the eagle) near Waterville. While some sites were the breeding haunts of our other native eagle, the golden eagle, most of the coastal sites were once occupied by sea eagles. By 1894, there were still one or two pairs in Mayo and Kerry, but by 1900 the species was gone, the last documented nesting being in 1898. golden eagles hung on as a breeder for another 14 years, the last pair nesting in Mayo about 1912. Thereafter, for the first time in millennia, Irish skies were devoid of eagles.
However, in 2007 the Golden Eagle Trust, in collaboration with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, began efforts to reintroduce white-tailed sea eagles to Ireland. Fifteen chicks were collected from nests in west-central Norway by ornithologists from the Norwegian Institute of Nature Research and Norwegian Ornithological Society and transported to Kerry. The eaglets spend a further one to two months in captivity in Killarney National Park to familiarise them with their new surroundings. After their release, birds are provided with supplementary food to help them survive the first few months in the wild. Because the released birds lack the care and attention of their parents, it is important that we give them a helping hand at this critical stage. To date, 35 young sea eagles have been released in Kerry.
But back to Norway. Over the week spent there we collected 20 eagle chicks for transportation to Ireland. Most were collected from nests on the islands of Hitra and Froya, west of the city of Trondheim, and Vikna, Leka and Flatanger north of Trondheimsfjord. Chicks are collected under a licence that allows us to take one chick from nests that have at least two chicks. Norway has a very healthy population of some 2,500 pairs of sea eagles, approximately 25 per cent of the world population, so the birds taken for reintroduction to Ireland have no real impact on numbers. Like many other birds of prey, sea eagles suffered population declines throughout Europe in the mid-20th century due to the effects of organochlorine pollutants such as DDT on reproduction. However, populations in western and northern Norway escaped the worst of these effects.
Norway has one of the world’s most rugged coastlines, made up of numerous long, narrow fjords and some 50,000 islands. No bird personifies this watery world better than the sea eagle. Nests are located less than 3km from the sea or large lakes and fish make up more than 90 per cent of the diet of breeding adults. Sea eagle territories average about 15km of coastline, so it is easy to see why eagles are superabundant in Norway. Although young birds wander up to 1,000km from their nest site in the first few years, except in the far north, adults remain all year round on territories.
We made a special excursion to Flatanger, an area renowned for sea eagles and home to Ole-Martin Dahle. Once a singer in a rock band, Dahle now runs an ecotourism business called Norway Nature, largely featuring sea eagle tourism, but also local wildlife such as moose and the turkey-sized capercaillie. Photographers from Europe and beyond come to “shoot” eagles. Few people know sea eagles quite like Dahle. En route to collect a sea eagle chick from an offshore island, we were treated to a spectacle Dahle’s clients pay a lot of money for.
Having cut the engine, Dahle starts to break off chunks of bread to throw to the gulls following us. Although we can’t see any as yet, the activity of the gulls is sure to attract the attention of the local sea eagles interested in a free meal. Dahle then throws a fish overboard and we wait. The tension is palpable. Within minutes, an eagle appears. Gulls scatter as the king (or queen) of the fjord arrives. Circling the boat once, the adult sea eagle folds its wings and drops rapidly, plucking the fish cleanly from the surface with what seems like little effort. All I can do is watch in amazement, while photographer Valerie O’Sullivan goes into overdrive. It all passes in seconds, but the memory stays for life. And O’Sullivan has the pictures to prove it.
In Flatanger we met one of the biggest sheep-farmers in the area, Uve Løfsnes. I wanted to talk to Løfsnes about being a sheep-farmer living with a dense population of sea eagles because of the concerns raised by Irish farmers that eagles would prey on lambs. Løfsnes farms the small traditional breed of sheep found along the coast and islands in Norway. This hardy breed stays out all winter and lambs in the open. Løfsnes tells me he has never had a problem with eagles. Even though he regularly saw the sea eagle feeding in lambing fields on lambs that had died soon after birth (which he deliberately left for the eagles), he did not have any worries about sea eagles and had never seen or heard of them taking a live lamb. Although there have been reported issues with sea eagles and lambs in the west of Scotland, it was interesting to hear a first-hand Norwegian experience.
I left feeling that Norwegians, like the Irish, are largely rural and dependent on farming, fishing and more recently, tourism. Apart from enjoying the natural beauty of Norway, the rugged coasts and islands, and the seemingly endless forests, the people’s care for the environment and its wildlife were impressive. Norwegian farmers now live in apparent harmony with their sea eagles. I can only hope that sometime we can see this relationship replicated in Ireland.
Although we believe that the project is on course to restore this magnificent eagle, a shadow has been cast over the future of the species. Between November 2007 and May 2009, seven sea eagles were recovered dead in Kerry. Toxicology tests found that five had died from ingesting poisons, presumably laid on sheep carcasses to kill foxes and crows. White-tailed sea eagles reach maturity at five to six years old, so we are hopeful that we will see the first breeding in Ireland by 2012. However, it is critical that enough birds survive to breeding age to establish a viable population. With the support of the public and the communities where eagles settle to breed, we hope that an iolar mhara will once again take its rightful place on the wild coasts and lakes of Kerry and beyond.
Dr Allan Mee is project manager with the Golden Eagle Trust. For more information and to support the reintroduction see www.goldeneagle.ie. For information on Ole-Martin Dahle’s ecotours see www.norway-nature.com.