My dogs fell silent ...had the glorious eagle spied a snack?

IT was Saturday last, high on a hill on the west side of Lewis, a day of blue skies and cool, brittle sunshine, the heather crunchy with frost and dusted still with the lightest overnight snow, and we were retreating from the summit when he materialised.

The eagle floated up from the cliffs below, caught a thermal draft, moved away and came back – and for moments held still, with the merest flicker of wing.

He moved off again, and then shimmied sideways and back – all the time regarding us with one blazing eye, huge wings extended, the outer feathers black and raised, not 50ft from us as we stood breathless. even my little dogs fell quiet.

Then he dismissed us from his concerns, and by the slightest adjustment of wing soared up and far away, on renewed circuit of his estate until he was lost to sight against the brindled moor.

It was my first sighting of aquila chrysaetos, the golden eagle, in more than a decade and only the second in my life when it was more than a distant dot above looming hills.

In hindsight, at a time of year when pickings are lean, it may well have been the Jack russells that caught his attention. One gamekeeper’s pet was actually snatched by an eagle in front of his appalled master here on Lewis a decade or two ago, and only a quick discharge of shotgun persuaded the raptor to drop him and flee. The terrier survived, though for several weeks was understandably loathe to leave the house.

Many tourists believe they have glimpsed an eagle when, actually, they haven’t. an ‘eagle’ spotted atop a fencepost is invariably a buzzard; anyway, the eagle circles more slowly, has a longer tail and a more obvious and commanding head.

Two things make an eagle unmistakable: its sheer size and its flight. an eagle’s span, on the wing, is some 7ft; its gulpinducing talons are bigger than a man’s fists. and eagles do not so much fly as float, making use of any available draught and covering its domain – for a pair of eagles is ferociously territorial – with extraordinary economy of motion.

It is this majesty that since Biblical times has made the eagle an emblem of agility, freedom, might and vigilance and cold leadership and instant decision. The legions of rome conquered most of the known world with brazen eagles as their standards. From the romanovs to the Hohenzollerns to the United States, the eagle has served as national symbol, and the golden eagle specifically as the emblem of Mexico.

THe eagle may serenely f l oat but he has extraordinarily keen eyesight – able to espy as much as the stirring of a mouse. He can spot a rabbit from two miles distant and his vision is two to four times sharper than ours.

Unlike a dog – which can see only blue, yellow and otherwise shades of grey – he sees everything in glorious Technicolor and his powerful ocular muscles keep his view in perfect focus even at full speed.

Indeed, though he only weighs about 10lb (and his feathers are heavier than his bones) his eyes are the same size as ours – and they weigh more than his brain. He is aided by an extraordinarily flexible neck able to turn his head almost 270 degrees. and when the eagle strikes, it is with ferocious speed – able to blast to its chosen prey at up to 150 miles an hour, making the golden eagle one of the two fastest animals on earth.

They mate for life – 15 to 30 years – and like open, mountainous country. They are particularly wary of man and of any sort of built development. a pair likes about 70 square miles of heath and hill all to them- selves, where – in Scotland – they will typically feast off hares, rabbits, grouse and carrion. (But they have been known to take foxes and, in 1961, a salmon was found in one Lewis eyrie.)

Their courtship rites are endearing, with lots of undulating aerial displays and a curious trick: he will pick up a goodsized rock, drop in mid-air and then swoop down to catch it before it hits the moor. She will do the same, though usually with a clod of earth. Sometimes they will show off with small sticks instead.

Duly wed, they will build several eyries around their chosen manor – vast twiggy affairs, lined with grass and moss – and use a different one each year.

But, though assiduous parents, the eagle has several vulnerabilities in its reproductive cycle. They rarely lay more than two eggs and the first hatched has a nasty tendency to attack and kill its younger sibling.

Though usually independent of mum and dad after four months, the eagle takes four to five years to attain sexual maturity, and its primary mission in youth is to find its own territory and an impressed mate.

Oddly, for so ferocious a killingmachine, the eagle is generally silent, and when it does call it’s an unimpressive, petulant, mewling sound, very like a tiny puppy. The late Peter Cunningham, an authority on Hebridean birds, reckoned there were 25 breeding pairs of golden eagles on Lewis and Harris and around 18 in the other Outer Hebrides – which, remarkably, would give the Western Isles a tenth of the entire Scottish population.

In all england there is only one golden eagle – poor old eddy, an ageing male flapping about the Lake District with no hope of a mate – and when he dies there will be eagles in england no more. They were extinct in Ireland by the First World War, but are now being reintroduced under anxious supervision, Scottish eaglets being transported for the purpose.

england’s hope is a Scottish government scheme to repopulate the wild Langholm estate in Dumfriesshire, from which in time Cumbria could be naturally recolonised.

BUT the golden eagle’s chief foe remains not predation or disease or climate change but man. Incredibly, this glorious bird is still hated and feared by many and is ‘subject to traps, snares, poison or the gun’, laments one report, ‘most notably around the intensively managed grouse moorlands of t he c e ntral a nd eastern Highlands’.

It would be dishonest to pretend they have not at times been targeted by Hebridean crofters too, fearful for their l ambs. Peter Cunningham recalled bleakly one study of local eagles that had to be abandoned because so many Lewis eyries that year were attacked (even though this is a serious criminal offence and, indeed, you need a permit from the Scottish government to approach an eyrie in use).

an eagle will, of course, occasionally take a lamb – almost always an ailing or vulnerable one that would have joined the choir invisible in any event – and, as even a small lamb bears a lot of wool, an eyrie can give the unfortunate i mpression that eagles feast on small sheep on a daily basis.

Local politics have pretty well done for eddy, as Cumbrian rSPB wardens candidly shared with a London paper their ‘pragmatic reluctance about investing finite conservation resources in acting as matchmaker for the ageing eddy, a bird nobody was even sure remained fertile, combined with the difficulties in winning over reluctant stakeholders in the form of sheep farmers and gamekeepers wary of these great birds…’

I myself, you note, have coyly neglected to pinpoint where we saw our eagle, lest some oaf with a shotgun go hunting or a despicable egg collector amends his holiday plans.

‘Visitors are advised to watch those magnificent birds from a discreet distance,’ wrote Peter in his Birds of the Outer Hebrides. ‘The gratuitous interference by photographers or even well- intentioned bird lovers might prove the last straw to an endangered species.’