Disappearance of conservation project white-tailed eagles probed

The disappearance of three white-tailed eagles who were part of a successful conservation programme is being investigated by police.

The cases include a chick born in the wild earlier this year in Sussex, one of the first white-tailed eagles to fledge in England for hundreds of years.

Forestry England said satellite trackers from two eagles were found in September, apparently cut off and dumped close to the birds’ last recorded location.

The missing birds are part of a project led by Forestry England and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation to reintroduce the birds which had been extinct in England for more than two centuries. The charity said the finds were “devastating”.

Thirty-seven birds were initially released on the Isle of Wight in 2019. Several breeding pairs have since formed with six chicks being born in the wild for the first time since the 1780s.

Forestry England said a satellite tag belonging to a chick – G842 – was recovered from the River Rother, near Petersfield on the Hampshire-Sussex border on 26 September.

It had been removed from the bird using a sharp instrument. Searches in the area to try and locate the body of the bird were unsuccessful.

Sussex Police has appealed for information from anyone who was in or around Harting Down and Petersfield on the evening of 20 September and may have seen the bird or any suspicious behaviour.

Tim Mackrill from the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation said: “So many people in the area had shared the joy of seeing these birds breed again after hundreds of years and our ongoing monitoring has shown how well they were fitting into the landscape.

“To have that destroyed just a few months later is deeply shocking.”

Dyfed Powys Police is investigating a similar incident on 13 September, where a satellite tag belonging to white-tailed eagle G615 was recovered in remote moorland near the Gwgia Reservoir, Tregynon.

Police Scotland is treating the disappearance of a third bird as suspicious. The tag for G819 stopped transmitting data daily on 8 November in the Moorfoot Hills area.

The Birds of Poole Harbour group said any illegal persecution of the birds was “sickening”.

The group promotes conservation efforts on the Dorset coast where a single male white-tailed eagle chick hatched earlier this year.

In a Facebook post it said: “The return and recolonisation of white-tailed eagles is still in it’s infancy, so the illegal killing of the birds can have a massive detrimental impact on the project and their recovery across their historic range.”