\n A white-tailed eagle was spotted in Ardingly Reservoir (Image: Henry Sharkey)\n<\/p>\n
\n White-tailed eagles are Britain\u2019s largest birds of prey and were once widespread across England, until persecution by humans wiped out the entire population by 1780.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u00a0Also known as sea eagles, they are now being returned through a ground-breaking conservation project led by Forestry England and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n The project is reintroducing white-tailed eagles across southern England, returning a lost species that can offer wide-ranging benefits to nature, landscapes and people.\n<\/p>\n
\n A white-tailed eagle was spotted in Ardingly Reservoir (Image: Henry Sharkey)\n<\/p>\n
\n The project team released 37 birds on the Isle of Wight in 2019, under licence from Natural England, with the long-term aim of establishing an initial six to eight breeding pairs along the south coast of England.\n<\/p>\n
\n All juvenile eagles are collected from wild nests in Scotland, under licence from NatureScot, and then translocated to the Isle of Wight and reared in special aviaries before being released.\n<\/p>\n
\n As of August 2025, 45 young white-tailed eagles have been released by the project, and several pairs of birds have established territories in the south of England.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2023 a chick hatched at an undisclosed nest site in Sussex for the first in England since the eighteenth century.\n<\/p>\n
\n A further two chicks were born in the summer of 2024, and in the summer of 2025 pairs in Sussex and Dorset both bred, bringing the total number of white-tailed eagles born in the wild to six.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Henry Sharkey said he spotted two white-tailed eagles, also known as sea eagles, at Ardingly Reservoir in West…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-267368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}