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Am Bratach No. 211
Nature’s call Open wide! It won’t hurt”. When you are trying to take a mouth swab sample from a Golden Eagle it pays to be polite if you want to keep your fingers. When you see the remains of a badger’s skull, a tawny owl’s wing and a bit of antler from a stag lying in the nest, you know this is a top predator, which has some dangerous bits of kit. Hanging from a rope over a large precipice with not much room to manoeuvre the last thing you need is one of those large talons stuck in your arm. But that is exactly what happened to a friend of mine. After many years of research, scientists have now identified enough tags in the golden eagle genes to allow individual golden eagles to be identified by their DNA. Work has begun to build up a database of DNA from golden eagles from all over Scotland by taking mouth swab samples or even feathers. In theory this means a family history for an individual bird can be worked out. It will help researchers gather information on eagle movements and also importantly it may help prevent illegal persecution. For example if an eagle carcass is found on the hillside it may be possible to tell if the bird is one of the resident pair or an unattached interloper and if so where it came from. So when licensed eagle workers are at an eagle eyrie ringing the youngsters they are encouraged to obtain a mouth swab as well. Naturally the bird’s welfare always comes first no matter what the circumstances. However, when an eagle talon goes so far into your forearm that it is making a bulge on the skin on the opposite side of your arm, you realise how important it is to take a colleague with you. Getting a golden eagle talon out of your arm is not a job you can do yourself whilst hanging from the side of a cliff trying not to draw attention to yourself, or distressing the bird in any way. However I was very impressed how my friend reacted. The whole time he was trying to extricate his limb from the bird talons, he was issuing soothing noises to the bird. Once removed he carefully and lovingly set the young eagle back on his eyrie amongst the left-over grouse meals and woodrush nest lining. It was only when he was safely retreating and several hundred metres away from the nest, well out of earshot of any eagle parents did the air go blue and the planning start for a visit to the A&E. It seems to me that this spring has seen an increase in the number of eagle sightings — especially young birds. Golden eagles don’t normally breed until they are five years old and so sub-adults, as they are called, often drift around the countryside looking for somewhere where they won’t be chased off by resident, long established eagles — somewhere where they can get some peace to hunt. The apparent increased number of young birds may be a sign that, at least in North West Sutherland, the last few years have been good for eagles. Productivity is not normally very high here. Impoverished soils do not support as many game birds, such as red grouse and ptarmigan, or rabbits and hares as they might have in the past. Constant heather burning combined with heavy rainfall in some places has washed out much of the important nutrients levels in the soils and changed the dominant vegetation type. Last week, however, I was privileged
to witness a pair of golden eagles put on an acrobatic display
par excellence. I watched for nearly two hours as they circled
and swooped, at times mirroring each other like synchronised
swimmers at the Olympic Games. Often they came so close that
their feathers almost touched. They were complete masters of
the air and as I watched entranced by their performance, sometimes
I couldn’t remember when they had last had to beat their
huge wings. Three times I watched them twist round each other
so their talons grappled momentarily in mid-air. And once, as
they circled close to the top of the mountain summit, they spooked
a ptarmigan. With fast whirring wings the panicked bird bolted
from its rocky cover. But the eagles were not in the mood for
feeding and only a slight tilting of their wings showed they
had even noticed it. Eventually I had to leave them as they disappeared
higher and higher into the blue sky. Andy Summers is a senior Highland
Council ranger, based at Lochinver. |