The honey buzzard is one of Britain's most enigmatic and elusive birds, poorly named (being neither a buzzard nor an eater of honey) and under-reported.  In August, Roy Dennis and his team, having discovered a honey buzzard nest in woodland in Moray, where Roy lives, fitted a highly sophisticated satellite transmitter to a female chick. A month later, the bird left on migration for Africa, but experienced the most dramatic start to her journey, blown eastwards across the North Sea to Denmark. She survived, and after several days' rest, continued on her journey, correctly turning south tow ..read more

The project to reintroduce white-tailed eagles to the Isle of Wight continues, and in this - the second year of five - seven birds have been released.  This podcast picks up the story from when they were taken south from Scotland to their new home - pilot Graham and his daughter Helen Mountford of Civil Air UK making two voluntary trips to fly the birds to the Isle of Wight - but instead of focussing on the fortunes of this year's birds, we look instead at a major milestone in the project overall.  One bird - G3-24 - has returned to the Isle of Wight after two months in Scotland. Wha ..read more

In the previous podcast, Ian Perks described his work collecting eagles for translocation from nests in the Western Isles to a new home on the Isle of Wight.  Now, the chicks safely collected, it's time to care for them while they wait to be taken south. This is the 2020 cohort for the white-tailed eagle reintroduction programme, a joint venture between the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation and Forestry England which had a successful start twelve months ago.  In this year of lockdown, though, it's not as straightforward as it might be, with the usual team unable to travel to help feed t ..read more

In early August 2020, seven white-tailed eagles were released on the Isle of Wight in the second year of a five-year project to establish a breeding population there.  Using an audio diary recorded by Ian Perks of the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, this podcast looks back at the early stages of this year's work, and finds out how some of the chicks were collected from their nests.  The podcast follows Ian and Justin Grant as they travel to the Western Isles, where with the help of Robin Reid of the RSPB, they check nest sites for suitable candidates for translocation.  The Cov ..read more

It's exactly a year since the release of six white-tailed eagles on the Isle of Wight, a return to a place where they last bred in 1780.  It's a good moment, then, to take a look at the progress of the birds released in 2019, and to hear about the impact they have had on some of the people who have encountered them.    In this five-year project, working in partnership with Forestry England, the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation aims to translocate up to sixty white-tailed eagles from Scotland to the island.  In this, the second year, the Covid 19 outbreak has naturally m ..read more

8th April 1960 was the day when Roy Dennis saw his first ever osprey, while working at the famous Loch Garten site in the Highlands of Scotland. Sixty years on, he's still working with the birds, and this podcast was recorded in early March as (with colleagues Fraser Cormack and Ian Perks) he sets out to rebuild a local osprey nest which is in danger of collapse.  It was built back in 1967 by only the second osprey pair in Scotland and rebuilt by Roy seven years later, after it crashed to the ground, taking with it the chick inside it. Once the new nest was in place, Roy placed the c ..read more

This week's podcast hears from the Isle of Wight, ten weeks after the release of six white-tailed eagles in the last place they bred in England, 240 years ago.   Two of the project's  volunteer team - biologist Tracy Dove and ornithologist Jim Baldwin - and Forestry England's White-Tailed Eagle Project Officer, Steve Egerton-Read, talk about whether there has been an 'eagle effect' on the island since their release.  Has widespread interest in the birds spread out to a broader interest in nature and the environment?   Of course, with a project like this, aiming to introduce ..read more

The white-tailed eagle had been absent from Scotland for forty years when the very first attempt at reintroduction took place in 1958. A later project, led in 1968 by Roy Dennis and George Waterston on Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland, was groundbreaking but also unsuccessful, due largely to the very small number of birds involved.  This podcast, though, hears from John Love, in conversation with Roy, as he talks about his ten years on the Hebridean island of Rum, site of the first successful reintroduction of sea eagles to Scotland, led by John in partnership with Ro ..read more

The release of six white-tailed eagle chicks on the Isle of Wight in August this year was just one of the early steps on a very long road.  The ultimate goal of the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation and Forestry England is to see the species breed again in England after an absence of 240 years, but first the eagles have to learn where they fit in this unfamiliar landscape. The podcast hears about the experience of the Irish White-Tailed Eagle Reintroduction project, which released 100 chicks over 5 years from 2007, and saw the first successful breeding in 2012.  The bird is not an easy ..read more

As the satellite-tagged osprey Deshar continues to seek a permanent spot in West Africa in which to settle, this podcast looks at how ospreys on their first migration have to compete for space with older birds unwilling to give up prime locations.  Roy Dennis explains how  ospreys learn to adapt to fishing in foreign waters, facing new hazards such as crocodiles,  and hears from The Gambia on how juveniles cope with the hostility of more experienced birds.  Because each bird is an individual, with its own particular skills, we also hear how some are simply better than other ..read more