Ten white-tailed sea eagles have been flown into Kerry from Norway today as part of a largely successful reintroduction programme.
The programme began in the Killarney National Park in 2007 and has seen eagles pair and nest in a number of locations countrywide.
The latest chicks are between seven and ten weeks and have been plucked from the wild in the Trondheim area of Norway.
They were collected under licence by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
Tucked into individual cages, they arrived safely after their journey of over four hours on a chartered flight.
When the programme began 13 years ago, public meetings were held against the project and hill farmers, fearing their lambs would be stolen, protested at the airport in Farranfore.
But today, these distant relatives of the originals were met with only a welcoming party of wildlife officials and the eagle project manager.
They were being taken to two locations - Lough Derg in Co Clare, where the very first sea eagles were born in 2013, and the Shannon estuary near Tarbert in north Kerry.
The chicks will acclimatise for five to six weeks before being released, project manager Allan Mee outlined.
The new arrivals were brought in "to bolster" the existing population which has done fairly well, despite losses from poisonings and such, Mr Mee said.
"We will have six fledglings from five nests including Killarney this year," he said.
That will bring to 32 the number of sea eagles born since the ambitious move to bring back the extinct species that was once part of Irish literature and folklore.
The sea eagle is Ireland's largest bird, with a wingspan of up to 2.45 metres. Females are about 40% larger than the males and can weigh up to 7kg.
A scientific review of the reintroduction project indicated the small population is still vulnerable to mortality factors such as illegal poisoning and the breeding population and it was negatively impacted by Avian flu in 2018 and Storm Hannah in 2019.
Because of that, it was decided to carry out a supplementary release to bolster the existing population, the Department of Culture Heritage and the Gaeltacht said.
There were plans to boost the eagles numbers too in Killarney National Park where the fishing eagles are keenly appreciated by tourists along the Long Range River and Upper Lake particularly.
Additional eagles will be brought into Farranfore from Norway over the next three years, Mr Mee expects.
The white-tailed sea eagle reintroduction project is a joint initiative between the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Golden Eagle Trust, in collaboration with the Norsk Institutt for Naturforskning and the Norwegian Ornithological Society.
According to the NPWS, pairs of eagles are nesting now in counties Cork, Kerry, Tipperary and Galway.
In April, Glengarriff Nature Reserve in west Cork announced the arrival of a chick, the second born in County Cork in a decade and that chick's activities have been caught and followed on webcam.
