Sea eagle passed through
So G274 passed through Somerset on 16th April, flying over Taunton and onto the Avalon Marshes. Did anyone see it during lockdown?
If I recall, in the Ilminster area, 16th April was an overcast morning before clearing early afternoon.
Interesting to see from Roy that “He crossed into Somerset at 13:00, and 40 minutes later was over the M5 approaching Taunton at an altitude of 559 metres. He skirted around the east side of the city and then continued on a north-easterly track, passing low over Avalon Marshes and then across the west side of Westhay Moor NNR in the Somerset Levels – undoubtedly a potential future breeding area for White-tailed Eagles.”
Full flight report is here
This would have been quite a sight given a flight around Somerset and just before Lockdown.
G318
G318 was undoubtedly the most sedentary of the three birds that spent the whole of the winter on the Isle of Wight. In February, for example, she lived in an area of less than 1km². However, that changed on 16th March when she crossed the Solent and flew north-west across the New Forest to north-east Dorset. She spent all of the next day in a wooded area near Sixpenny Hendley, and then made her way slowly north into Wiltshire on 18th. After two days in an arable area west of Salisbury, G318 flew to the Wiltshire-Somerset border near Longleat on 21st March and next day she completed an amazing 101 km circuit of Somerset. She passed over Westhay Moor in the Somerset Levels at around 9:00 before continuing west, almost to the coast. After pausing in an arable field east of Burnham-on-Sea she headed north towards Weston-super-Mare and then east over Banwell and Sandford. At 14:40 she was just 3.5 km south of Chew Valley Lake, flying south-east at an altitude of 432 metres. Two hours later she was back on the Wiltshire border.