My first thought is this: five dead eagles and where is the outrage?
My second is why is this not news that makes big headlines?
So what happened? Five eagles turned up dead on the Hebridean islands of Lewis and Harris.
First, two golden eagles and a sea eagle, all decomposed, were found at Bowglass in Harris on August 7.
One week later, two golden eagles were found dead at Bragar in Lewis.
Five dead eagles. I look at the words on the page and I imagine what that looks like in real life, or rather real death.
It is difficult to imagine a worse crime against wildlife in Scotland.
So I ask myself my own question again: where is the outrage?
A subsequent police statement was on the brief side of terse.
Its most eyebrow-raising aspect was that the two incidents are not being treated as linked.
The two sites are about 30 miles apart as the eagle flies, or in this case, as the eagles flew.
A golden eagle could cover the distance in 20 minutes if it was in the mood.
Clearly, it is not my job to tell the police how to do their job. They will have their reasons for not linking them.
Yet as one who has watched eagles in the wild for 40 years and written fairly extensively about them, for that is my job, I have never heard of anything like this, and my sense of outrage is off the scale.
I don’t see three eagles in Harris and two more in Lewis, I see five dead birds within 30 miles on the same island landmass.
And my mind is most definitely linking them, and so is anyone else who cares about eagles.
Landowners’ suggestion defies belief
Rather more eyebrow-raising is a statement from Scottish Land and Estates.
Having hastened to point out – perhaps a touch defensively – that there is no grouse shooting in the Western Isles, it then appeared to say that it was taking seriously a suggestion by parties unnamed that the dead birds may have killed each other.
I quote:
“It has been suggested that intraguild predation – where one species predates on another – may be one possible explanation…but equally we accept that there is the prospect that a terrible wildlife crime has been committed to protect livestock…”
I am trying to work out how “intraguild predation” might operate in this case.
A white tailed eagle kills two golden eagles at Bowglass in Harris, deposits them side by side, flies up to Bragar in Lewis, kills two more, flies back to Bowglass and dies beside its victims from its wounds?
Or perhaps it commits suicide faced with the awfulness of its own crimes?
Response raptor fatalities should not depend location or land use – new blog post here:https://t.co/bjkLjCnX0g pic.twitter.com/OXaYClzOID
— ScottishLand&Estates (@ScotLandEstates) August 20, 2021
Intraguild predation – really?
It is much more likely that the birds were killed one at a time – by people – and dumped.
It’s even possible that they were brought to the islands together to be dumped and the decomposition of the Harris birds was actively encouraged by whoever dumped them.
And no, of course I don’t know what happened.
Except this: five eagles died.
And this: there are a lot of people who work on estates the length and breadth of Scotland who don’t like these birds. Who might be tempted to kill them, dump them and try to cover their tracks if they know they can get away with it.
Could eagles’ deaths lead to law change?
Scotland’s reputation as a stronghold of Victorian landowning malpractice is uniquely awful in 21st century Western Europe. This case is, for the moment at least, in a class of its own, but consider this:
The golden eagle population is higher than it has been for some years, at over 500 pairs, and the white-tailed eagle population is now growing much faster.
I suggested in my book, The Eagle’s Way (Saraband 2014) that it was a question of time before the white-tailed eagle population outnumbers the golden eagle, for that is the historical norm.
There is no threat to golden eagles from such a situation (both thrive alongside each other in Norway with more than 2,000 pairs of sea eagles), but because the sea eagle is much more of a generalist than the golden eagle both in its diet and its habitat, expect threats from landowning interests to intensify.
FIVE EAGLES FOUND DEAD in Western Isles – Police Scotland open investigation.
Take note, pls @MairiGougeon @MathesonMichael @MairiMcAllan Nobody ever convicted for killing an eagle in Scotland. Ever. It's all too easy.https://t.co/z03CgkduQv @andywightman pic.twitter.com/3sL3LFxvcB
— Raptor Persecution (@RaptorPersScot) August 20, 2021
The new SNP-Scottish Greens coalition has already shown an awareness that wildlife crime is a phenomenon that shames Scotland.
Right there, in Lewis and Harris, and right now is all the incentive they will ever need to wipe Victorian ethics from face of the land. It’s time.
In our lamentably wolfless Scotland, the golden eagle is nature’s ultimate symbol, and in the last five decades, the white-tailed eagle with its greater size and willingness to live alongside us, has also acquired its own talismanic status.
My fear is that society is already so accustomed to estates killing wildlife that our response reduces to a shrug.
No one goes to jail, so what can you do?
Then this: five eagles dead and dumped. And where’s the outrage?