Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation: hands-on conservation

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 meant a different way of working, but a second batch of birds has been released, as planned. Future podcasts will look at the detail of how this translocation was carried out: how the birds were collected from their eyries, how they were cared for by Roy and his team at his home in the Scottish Highlands, moved to the Isle of Wight and finally released in early August of this year. Already, a bond is forming between one of the 2019 birds and the new arrivals, and fascinating satellite data is telling Roy and his colleagues about the way that eagles learn their landscape, shedding light on the amazing journeys they undertake in the years before they are old enough to breed.
Producer: Moira Dennis
Contributors (in order of appearance): Fraser Cormack, Tim Mackrill, Dave Sexton, Pauline Jacobs, Roy Dennis, Ian Perks, Steve Egerton-Read, Ed Drewitt, RJ Macaulay
Music credit: Realness by Kai Engel, from the Free Music Archive
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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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 chick in its new home, where the adult birds continued to feed it, and it survived. Since then, the nest has remained a successful breeding site, but the tree on which it sits has now started to lean and looks in serious danger of collapse, so it's time to intervene once more.
Using techniques borrowed from the birds themselves, Roy, Ian and Fraser use material from the old nest to make a new one, building a framework of dead sticks lined with moss on a platform hoisted into the tree as a base. It's a tried and tested technique, and the provision of such nests enables ospreys to establish successful breeding partnerships and, it's hoped, boost overall numbers. While the Scottish population has grown to more than 300 pairs since that first pair sixty years ago, it is still far smaller than it could (or should) be, and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation engages in direct, hands-on conservation as a means to enable it to grow further.
This podcast was recorded before the introduction of restrictions on movement due to coronavirus.

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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 Covid 19 outbreak meant a very different way of working for the team, but this podcast hears how, while observing lockdown rules, the project was able to continue uninterrupted. One of the biggest differences was that, due to the Covid 19 outbreak, the nests had not been checked in advance this year. Many were found to have only one young, and chicks can only be taken from nests with at least two. In some cases, though, Ian fitted a satellite radio to single chicks, meaning that data will be fed back from birds that will fledge in the Western Isles as well as on the Isle of Wight.
Ian and Fraser Cormack later made trips to Mull, Skye and Sutherland, in the north of the mainland, in an effort to get as many chicks as possible for translocation, before the birds were sent south to the Isle of Wight, to be kept in hacking cages prior to their release.
Contributors (in order of appearance):
Tim Mackrill
Ian Perks
Fraser Cormack
Roy Dennis
Robin Reid
Producer: Moira Dennis
Music: Realness by Kai Engel, downloadable from the Free Music Archive
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Roy Dennis specialises in the translocation of species: moving birds, in this case osprey chicks, from one area to another, to help grow the population. This is hands-on conservation: the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation prides itself on its direct and proactive approach to wildlife conservation.
It is year three of a five-year project, with the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, working in collaboration with the conservation charity Birds of Poole Harbour, aiming to send a total of 60 young ospreys from the Highlands of Scotland to the south coast of England. It's not that Scotland has 'enough' ospreys and can afford to pass some on: it's more that a population at saturation point, as it is in Roy's study area, means that birds have less chance of breeding. If some young are moved, the idea is that they will return from migration, if they survive, to find a mate in their adopted area, and have the space to breed there without undue competition from other ospreys.
In recordings made largely as they carry out their fieldwork, Roy and his team (Tim Mackrill and tree climbers Fraser Cormack and Ian Perks) describe the privilege of working with these special creatures, and of being allowed an insight into the lives of a species which, only recently, was on the brink of extinction in the UK.
Roy has worked in conservation all his life and has seen the osprey population grow from a single pair in Scotland in 1960, the only ones in the UK at that time, to two pairs in 1963 - a slow growth in the face of egg thieves and persecution - until now, when there are around 300 pairs in Scotland, a small population in the north of England, ten pairs at Rutland Water (where Roy carried out a translocation project in the 1990s) and a further small population which has spread from there into Wales.
Future podcasts will follow the osprey chicks' journey from Scotland to Poole Harbour, their weeks there spent 'learning' their new landscape and, once they can fly, their eventual release back into the wild.
Music credit: Realness by Kai Engel, from the Free Music Archive
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Contributors in order of appearance:
Roy Dennis
Tim Mackrill
Ian Perks
Fraser Cormack
Producer: Moira Hickey

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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 one to track down, even if satellite-tagged: it spends long periods simply sitting still, either waiting to hunt, eating or digesting its food, so sightings of the bird that has roamed from the Isle of Wight to Oxfordshire have been few and far between, despite the fact that it's our largest bird of prey. Even if we humans struggle to see it, though, the local birdlife is always well aware of its presence, and the podcast explores the relationship between other carrion eaters - such as red kites, jackdaws and magpies - and this mighty newcomer to their patch.
Producer: Moira Hickey
Contributors (in order of appearance): Roy Dennis, Fraser Cormack, Allan Mee, Tim Mackrill, Ian Lewington, Steve Egerton-Read
Music credit: Realness by Kai Engel, from the Free Music Archive
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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