White-tailed eagle, Ince Marshes

Imagine if 40 years ago somebody had told you that one day you'll see a white-tailed eagle sitting on the saltmarsh on the Mersey near Frodsham and not only that, you'll video it on your phone, having a poo, from 1.2 miles away! Well today was that day. Such is modern day birding! 

Around three weeks ago a female white-tailed eagle turned up at Ince Marshes in Cheshire and rather than just fly straight over never to be seen again, as seems to be the norm with this species in North West England, it decided to stay a while on the saltmarsh and was seen distantly by many local birders, best viewed from Hale lighthouse on the opposite side of the river over a mile away. It stayed for a couple of days and then disappeared, and that we thought was that. Amazingly though, two days ago it reappeared in exactly the same spot.

Today was my first opportunity to see the bird and I got to the lighthouse nice and early to find that I was the only birder present, at least for the first hour of so. My heart sank a bit. It's a big bird but it's a colossal estuary, approximately two miles wide at this point and seven miles long so finding a bird which if it had already fed could potentially sit in the same spot all day was never going to be easy. However, I did have some rough directions to go off, "look at the chimneys of Stanlow on the far side and yesterday it was under the 4th chimney from the left". I looked here first, but no it wasn't there this morning. So I scanned the edge of the saltmarsh to the left and after a few minutes spotted a large bird of prey right on the edge which from it's size just had to be the eagle. A great black-back mobbed it, the bird barely moved. It was considerably larger than the gull. 

Most of the time I watched it, the eagle either stayed in the same position or shuffled around a bit, but once I did see it fly a short distance, a typically breathtaking sight. Of course I have seen many white-tailed eagles in north west Scotland in previous years, and as recently as May saw an adult near Perth, but even so, to see one on the Mersey saltmarsh was a pretty awesome experience.

 

It's carrying a radio transmitter which identified it as a 2nd summer female known affectionately as "G542", a bird from the Isle of Wight reintroduction scheme. This scheme takes juveniles under licence from nests in Scotland and releases them on the Isle of Wight after a short period of acclimatisation.

Thanks to the radio transmitter the birds movements can be followed and show that this bird has wandered as far afield as Caithness in northern Scotland. This is apparently quite normal behaviour for these large birds of prey, in fact you may recall the Peak District's immature bearded vulture behaving in the same way three years ago. That bird came to the UK from the Alps and then at the end of the year returned home. In the case of the eagle, I find it fascinating to think that a bird which was hatched and reared almost to fledging in northern Scotland by wild parents but which was then taken and released in southern England, should wander back to northern Scotland but not stay there. The place where it first flew seems to be more important than where it was brought up when deciding where it wants to live. 

So is it tickable? Probably not you want your list(s) to have any credibility with the wider birding community, definitely if you don't care about that! Is it worth seeing? Absolutely. 

So here it is, the video everybody wants to see.....

A couple of days later just down the road by the old Runcorn bridge I came across at least three yellow-legged gulls on the Mersey sandbanks, two adults and a juvenile.