Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019 Page 17Y
ou never forget your first
sea eagle. I saw mine a cou-
ple of summers back, as I
bobbed around a wind-
swept loch on the Isle ofLewis attempting to catch salmon.
Huge she was, and perfectly regal, with
wings that spanned eight feet, and golden
talons the size of a man’s hand. As our boat
passed the shore where she rested on a peaty
hillock, we put down our fly rods and stopped
for a long look.
Britain’s biggest and most majestic bird of
prey has entranced people for millennia.
A few thousand years back, when they were
common on coasts, estuaries and river
systems, we believed they were the couriers of
the gods. Tribes in orkney would lay their
dead out on stretchers, until the great birds
had picked the bones clean. Then the eagles
would be killed and buried alongside the
humans they’d just feasted on, supposedly to
transport their bodies to the afterlife.
These days, we pay homage in a different
way. up in Scotland, where sea eagles were
once hunted to extinction (as they were in
the rest of the uK) there are now 130 breed-
ing pairs. They are a magnet to binocular-
wielding tourists who hope to spot them
swooping to pluck a fish from the waves, or
tear into an unfortunate rabbit.
According to the RSPB, the birds, referred
to by twitchers as the ‘feathered barn door’
generate an astonishing £5million a year for
the Isle of Mull economy. on Skye, they are
worth another £2.4million.
Now these avian celebrities, which can
weigh up to 15lbs, can be seen in England.
This week they returned to one of their
historic stomping grounds: the Isle of Wight.
Two juveniles were released at a secret
location on Wednesday, as part of a £250,
project to re-introduce them to a place where
the last breeding pair was wiped out about
240 years ago.
According to an onlooker, the smallest, a
male, fluttered a few hundred feet, while his
mate, hopped out of a cage gingerly before
flying to join him in a nearby tree.
Another four tasted freedom yesterday, each
wearing a tiny ‘rucksack’, carrying a satellite
tracker. All told, up to 60 sea eagles — also
known as white-tailed eagles — will be
released over the coming five years, in a move
that conservationists hope will eventually
establish a breeding population along Eng-
land’s southern coast.
‘I have spent much of my life working on the
reintroduction of these amazing birds, and so
watching them take to the skies of the Isle of
Wight has been a truly special moment,’ said
Roy Dennis, a naturalist running the project
with the Forestry Commission.
‘The return of these spectacular birds to
England is a real landmark for conservation,’
added Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England.
So far so heart-warming. But as so often when
we meddle with the delicate balance of the
countryside, one man’s triumph is another’s
tribulation. And in certain quarters of rural
by Guy
Adams
Britain, sea eagles turn out to be
very unpopular indeed.
T
o BLAME is a simple
fact: new-born lambs are
among the creatures
that feature in their
voracious diet.
In Scotland, where sheep farming
is already a marginal pursuit,
crofters claim to have lost large
percentages of their flocks, as pop-
ulations of the birds have grown.
A few years back, it was reported
that a single farm at Achnaba,
Argyll and Bute, had lost 181 lambs
in six years to sea eagles, while
crofters in Wester Ross reckoned
that 200 out of 1,000 lambs had
been taken in a single year.
The numbers are disputed by
conservationists, who last spring
tried building scarecrows and
shining laser beams on Highland
hillsides to scare the birds away.
But it didn’t work.
‘one lamb was killed, but another
has a hole in its side after a sea
eagle tried to take it,’ Colin
Cameron, who farms 2,500 sheep
on the Ardnamurchan peninsula,
told reporters.
‘It is still alive as I had to feed it
through a tube three times a day.
It is on penicillin to stop any infec-
tion, so I can’t let it outside, but
generally we don’t find any alive.’
In May came another minor PR
disaster for sea eagles: a holiday-
maker on Mull, Douglas Currie,
managed to photograph one carry-
ing away a lamb.
‘We saw this big shape through
the sky and my wife thought it was
a fish,’ he said. ‘We then realised it
was a lamb and I rattled off a load
of shots. The bird was struggling.
It’s the most extraordinary sight.’
Against this backdrop, it’s unsur-
prising that most of the Isle of
Wight’s 135 farmers, who between
them keep 40,000 sheep, are up in
arms at the birds’ arrival.
‘It’s madness,’ Phil Stocker, chief
executive of the National Sheep
Association, has commented.
‘Why would you introduce an
apex predator to the Isle of Wight,
without any understanding of the
consequences? It’s all about eco-
tourism — attracting more people
to the island.
‘But what happens if it all goes
wrong? You’ll have these giant
predators all over the South of
England and it’ll be too late to do
anything about it.
‘This is a highly urbanised setting
— they simply shouldn’t be here. Iwould think there is also a danger
to people’s pets — cats and dogs
and so on. It is ridiculous.’
The National Farmers’ union has
commented: ‘Any species reintro-
duction, particularly if it hasn’t
been in the area for many years,
can have a significant impact on
the many benefits that the coun-
tryside delivers. In the case of sea
eagles they are known to prey on
livestock, particularly live lambs.’
Similar fears helped scupper a
plan to introduce sea eagles to
Suffolk a few years ago. Farmers
with free-range chickens and pigs,
who feared the birds could panic
their livestock, successfully lobbied
the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs to withdraw
funding for what they called a
‘bird-brained’ initative.
This time, farmers’ concerns have
been ignored. And country people
are said to be particularly suspi-
cious of Natural England’s involve-
ment in the Isle of Wight project.
Tony Juniper, the quango’s new
chairman, is a one-time Green
Party politician and Friends of the
Earth executive. And it played a
central role in the debacle earlier
this year that briefly saw farmers
banned from shooting corvids,
pigeons and other avian pests
many of which prey on lambs.
Wherever one stands, the debate
now raging helps explain the
struggles that have been faced bysea eagles over the centuries.
once plentiful in Britain,
their habitat started to decline
after the Roman period, when
wilderness was cleared and
drained for farming.
Subsequently persecuted by
landowners, who wanted to pro-
tect livestock, they then became a
favoured prey of Victorian egg
hunters and taxidermists.S
EA eagles vanished from
the Lake District in the
1790s and from the rest
of England by the 1830s.
The last remaining pair perished in
Scotland during the early 1900s.
Their return in Scotland was pio-
neered by Roy Dennis, who in 1975
brought four Norwegian birds to
the island of Rum followed by
another 81 over the next decade.
Eventually, pairs began to form
and the first Scottish bird fledged
in 1985. By 2005, sea eagles were
being spotted soaring over Glasgow
and, in one case, the car park of an
ASDA store in Dumfermline.
Dennis, who is 79, now has
relocation down to a fine art.
The six juvenile birds taken to
the Isle of Wight were removed
from nests in Scotland two months
ago, by an assistant who climbed
the trees, aided by spikes attached
to the inside of his legs. The birdswere then driven south to their
release site and placed in a cage.
To increase their chances of
surviving in the wild, human
contact was kept to a minimum.
They were fed a diet of fish and
rabbits by keepers who remained
out of sight, passing meals into
their enclosure using a special
beak-shaped trowel.
Coming months will see further
meals sneaked onto the roof of
their release pen under cover of
darkness, to supplement the diet
while they learn to hunt.
Dennis and fellow conservation-
ists hope the sea eagles’ new
habitat will provide a steady diet of
fish and water birds, from the Eng-
lish Channel — and not too many
of the endangered red squirrels
and fluffy lambs who call the sur-
rounding farmland home.
But as the rural community
knows only too well, you take
nature for granted at your peril.
So no one can be sure how
things will play out until, as they
say, these magnificent eagles
have landed.Farmer’s
nightmare:
Giant bird
carries away
a lamb
on MullThey’re Britain’s largest
bird of prey, once
hunted to extinction.
Now, as sea eagles
are reintroduced
to the Isle of Wight,
feathers are flying in
a battle between bird
lovers and farmers
storm
into a
Swooping
Pictures: GETTY, DOUGLAS CURRIE/DEADLINE NEWS