Moncrieff<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cBut the cables are running diagonally and unfortunately for the swans, they are flying into the cables.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir eyes are at the side of their head, so they don’t see the cables and, unfortunately, they’re flying straight into it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s the unfortunate thing; 17 is the number that we have reported that we’ve dealt with.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Porter added that she suspects the true figure of birds killed by the bridge is much higher, as many deaths will go unreported.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cConsider that swans are basically one of the largest flying birds that we have, they could range anywhere between maybe at full size, right up to about 15 kilos, sometimes more,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey would fly right up to maybe 88 kilometres per hour.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, you can imagine the impact of a swan, a very heavy bird, flying at speed, hitting cables. It’s fairly catastrophic, unfortunately.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Porter continued that Kildare Wildlife Rescue want \u201cproper data\u201d to try and work out exactly when it tends to happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe swans I’ve responded to have generally been [injured] around high tide,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, if you can imagine the tide goes up and then that vertical space under the bridge isn’t [there], they’re not going to go under the bridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to ascertain really whether it’s on the flight path where they’re flying in from around Greater Dublin or it’s when they’re taken off from the water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s a lot of variables, including light, flight paths, obviously, tide times; that’s something that we really need all the information for, so that maybe we could approach engineers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Main image: A swan and the Samuel Beckett Bridge. Pictures by: PA and Alamy.com.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Swans in Dublin are dying after \u201cfairly catastrophic\u201d crashes into the Samuel Beckett Bridge, Kildare Wildlife Rescue has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-667223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}