Eagle watchers in Co Clare have been following a domestic situation playing out around a nest on Lough Derg with great interest since last year.
“It was very sad after [Saoirse] died, [Caimin] was staying very close to the nest area,” said Vera O’Rourke of Mountshannon Eagles organisation. She had inexplicably made a journey back to the area where she was born for the first time in three years to be with her grieving father.Eagles are fiercely territorial, even within families, and local eagle watchers were taken aback by Caltra’s arrival.
She then made a round trip of some 500km from Lough Erne in Fermanagh to her father at Lough Derg before travelling north again to Lough Swilly in Donegal.After spending the winter in Donegal, Caltra returned to the Lough Derg area last month, where she appears to have settled with a local widower, who lost his partner to suspected bird flu around the same time that Saoirse died.