Sea Eagles released

A batch of white tailed sea eagles are being released from a secret location in Fife in a bid to reintroduce the species to the east of Scotland.

The 15 birds of prey were collected as chicks from nests in Norway and raised in special aviaries. The birds will be radio tagged so their progress can be tracked.

It is the second year the East Scotland Sea Eagles (ESSE) project team have released the so-called "flying barn doors" into the wild.

Image : from the Aberdeen Bestiary. f61v Text: the eagle. Illustration: Two panels of eagles fishing and plunging into the renjuvenating spring. The lower section of the illustration is damaged. This is a Physiologus subject. The reference to catching fish means that the bird must be a sea eagle or osprey. The white tailed eagle is found in the Mediterranean. Although this is an original Physiologus subject, the illustrations of this bird are among the most varied, indicating the lack of an accepted common source.

One striking feature is its yellow eye from which it gains a poetic Gaelic name Iolairesuilnagreine ‘the eagle with the sunlit eye’. Its beak and talons are also bright yellow. Pliny the Elder records [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 10, 3-6): The eagle is the strongest and most noble bird. There are six kinds of eagles. Only the sea-eagle forces its unfledged young to look at the rays of the sun; if any of them blinks or has watering eyes, those ones are thrown out of the nest