Eagle chicks only survivors of breeding season

The Golden Eagle Trust has revealed the Mountshannon White-Tailed Sea Eagle chicks, the first to be born in Ireland in the wild in 110 years, are the only surviving chicks of this year’s breeding season.

The Trust confirmed that an eaglet born to a pair of White-tailed Sea Eagles in Kilarney’s National Park as part of the high profile reintroduction programme died this week after falling from the nest.

The pair of Mountshannon chicks fledged last week and are now mobile. They have reintegrated with the adults and the male is providing food for the chicks.
The sex of the birds is still unknown as a decision was made not to tag the chicks but now that they are mobile, Dr Allan Mee, project manager with the Golden Eagle Trust, said it looks like the chicks are a male and a female. This is something they can gauge by the size of the birds.

According to Dr Mee a female chick will, at this stage of development, be larger than a fuller grown male.

He added that without tagging, some the birds’ history will be lost but as they are the only two untagged sea eagles in Ireland, he expects they will receive sights of them when they eventually leave the area.
“We won’t lose all their history and it is very likely they will stay around Mountshannon for a couple a months,” he said.
If they get the go ahead to tag them, he said it would have to be done by trapping the birds.

He said the Golden Eagle Trust will maintain a presence in Mountshannon up until at least the end of August but that will depend on what the chicks will do. “We won’t be deserting Mountshannon,” he said.

Over the coming years, it is expected more of the 10 territorial pairs of White-tailed Eagles monitored and located this spring, between Cork and Galway, will nest, lay eggs and hopefully rear young. Other maturing birds released in recent years are also likely to augment the breeding population over time.
“It is hoped that, in time, these Irish-bred chicks, from Lough Derg, will survive and breed themselves in 2017 or thereafter,” he added.

Dr Mee stressed breeding attempts are prone to natural failures and over the long four to five month breeding season they can encounter a range of constraints and obstacles.
“This year three White-tailed Eagle pairs attempted to breed and laid eggs in Counties Clare and Kerry. One pair failed toward the end of the six-week incubation period. This pair is still on site and hopefully in a mere six-month’s time they will begin to breed again next spring.

“Another pair that nested in Killarney National Park hatched at least one chick that survived to within three to four weeks of fledging. But it was very disappointing to find that the new nest had collapsed causing the death of the chick, shortly before it was due to fledge. It seems likely that the nest material (vegetation, sods and dead branches) dried out and shrank significantly in the recent dry spell of weather,” he added.

The two chicks are expected to stay around the islands and western shoreline of Lough Derg, north and south of Mountshannon, for the coming weeks with their parents. Sometime in the autumn these juveniles will leave their parents’ territory and begin a three to four year nomadic life before settling in their own separate territories before attempting to breed themselves.

“These two young eagles represent the first of what we hope are many more Irish bred White-tailed Eagles to fledge from nests over the next few years and themselves form the basis for a viable self-sustaining Irish population. The signs are good that we can achieve this with 10 or more pairs likely to breed annually over the next few years. While there is still a lot of hard work to be done to achieve this goal we should savour this day as a really important milestone in the recovery of this iconic species.”

John Harvey, chairman of Mountshannon Community Council, expressed the delight felt locally.

“The pair of White-tailed Eagles took up residence here two years ago and has been an unexpected but very welcome addition to the heritage of East Clare. Ever since they began nesting this year in February, local people have taken a keen interest and helped monitor the progress of the pair. Last year the pair failed to hatch chicks so we were really hopeful things would work out this year and we would see chicks leave the nest. We hope that the association between Mountshannon and the eagles will continue for many years to come,” he said.