South East Birds of Prey

Latest News from the Centre

Charity Shoot 20th August 2009

Bishops Mountain Clay shooting club are hosting a Charity all rounder shoot on behalf of the South East Birds of Prey Centre. Bishops Mountain grounds can be found midway between Glenmore & Mullinavat in Co Kilkenny. Please visit Bishops Mountain Website for more info here....

 

Everyone is welcome, beginners and experienced shooters alike. The club will provide coaching staff for beginners and Down The Line (DTL), Automatic Ball Trap (ABT) and planning a 50 bird Sporting layout. There are plenty of prizes to be won on the day.

 

The event starts at 10.30 with refreshments available in the club house. Full details can be found in the PDF download available here....

July 2009 - Barny & Madge meet Tubridy.

Barny (the 3 year old Barn Owl) and Madge (the 18 year old Buzzard) were invited to a photo shoot with another celebrity Ryan Tubridy the new Late Late show presenter and all round good guy. Ryan is launching the 2009 Heritage Week event (details here...) and both Celebs got on very well during the photo shoot.

 

Barny is an old hand at the late late show having helped Pat & Don Conroy launch a very special competition for schools to design a Barn Owl Box in 2008.

 

21st July 2009 - Nelly RIP

 

Nelly our fantastically friendly European Eagle Owl Died today following our attempts to resuscitate her following her 'fly around' in March 2009. Nelly was very tame and one day decided to take off when we were cleaning out her aviary (1000 times before she just sat there and watched us clean!), so having decided to take in some of the local area views, she managed to get exactly 1 mile away in the 12 weeks, before Larry Meyler spotted her in Bailistown, Balycullane.

 

We recovered her and treated her to plenty of food and she was very underweight (she was normally 7lbs and weighed just over 3lbs when recovered). For 10 days we fed her plenty of food (stuffed with vitamin & food concentrate) and 'force fed' her fluids and was doing really well. However, on Sunday 19th she would not sit up, so on Monday we managed to get her to Peter Murphy of Summerhill's Vets to boost her with fluids. On Tuesday we (Peter and I) agreed to intravenously give her more fluids and poor old Nell's just could not take it and went into shock and died (I'm in bit's just writing this update!).

 

Our special thanks to Jack Smith who drove down from Bannager to help with Nelly and Peter Murphy who did his best for a great girl.

 

Sometimes you think you are just not cut out for animal welfare, but we did what we could and all the better for knowing this great bird.

 

June 2009 - Heritage Council Grant.

Once again the Heritage Council have been gracious in awarding the Centre a grant to further develop 3 new rehabilitation aviary's essential to prepare the birds for release. One of the aviary's is specifically designed to exercise birds prior to release by doing 'press ups'. This exercise builds up muscle where a birds has been immobile (deliberately restricted movement to allow recover and avoid any further damage) and we put them on 10ft high perch and make them fly down onto a mat for their food. Another of the aviary's can be turned to pitch black' (speeds up recovery) and the final aviary can be adapted into 4 separate sections for pre release accommodation.

 

May 2009 - 'Peggy' the One legged Peregrine.

.We are pleased to say that the Peregrine 'peggy' was released back to the wild in April and is now enjoying life back with her mate. This has been a significantly longer re-hab than usual, due to the repair to the wing that had been damaged by shotgun pellet. Full story here....

Last Updated 27.07.09