Record number of wild white-tailed eagle chicks hatched in England - Forestry England

First wild chick to fledge in Dorset for over 240 years

A record three white-tailed eagle chicks have successfully fledged from two wild nests in England. The chicks were reared by white-tailed eagles released in a ground breaking conservation project by Forestry England and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation to return this lost species to England.

Two different pairs of white-tailed eagles successfully bred this year. This included the first chick in Dorset for over 240 years, and two chicks raised in a nest in Sussex.

A single male chick (G834) fledged from a nest in Dorset. The parent birds - G463 and G466 released in 2020 - settled in the county and paired up in 2023. This is their first successful breeding attempt and made more remarkable by the fact that the male adult bird has only one leg after it lost this four years ago.

Two chicks, both females (G841 and G842), fledged this year from a nest in Sussex. Both are the offspring of two white-tailed eagles released by the project in 2020. The parent birds - G405 and G471 – were the same pairing that bred in 2023 and 2024.

This year’s successful breeding brings the number of these iconic birds born in the wild through the project to six. In 2023 a single chick was born, the first in England since the eighteenth century when the species was lost due to persecution. A further two chicks were born in the summer of 2024.

All of the chicks are fitted with satellite tags so that the project team can track their progress. Over the last year they have used satellite data to follow the fledglings as they have explored widely across the UK.