Golden eagles' return to English skies
bbc.co.ukThe reintroduction of Red Kites to the UK has been a huge success. I don't get particularly excited by birds normally, but regularly seeing such large creatures (almost 2m wingspans) curving through the sky is nothing short of majestic. They're almost reminiscent of dragons.
I wonder if I'll get to feel the same about golden eagles soon too.
I have large lungs, and can be very loud, and where I live the eagles ridge soar whilst going from one place to another, at just a bit higher than the tree tops, mostly baldies here with the ocasional golden, and for fun I started, belowing EEEGULL strait up at them, and they do a double take WTF, pull a hard wing over to get a better look and the finnish there turn, and blast off down wind, so if you get the chance, punking eagles is a blast
Can vouch for the loudness capability of large lungs.
A lady sitting in front of me at the football said she could feel the vibrations in her chest when I was loudly booing at the footy.
I had an x-ray a couple of years ago and was asked if I was a smoker, strangely because of the size of my lungs. Apparently, ironically, smokers lungs are larger than average and I have to assume it's to balance out all the damage that smoking does. I used to be a swimmer, so I figured my lungs must have developed from the requirement of controlled breathing as part of swimming (and the general fitness and therefore additional oxygen processing requirements).
I don't get particularly excited by birds normally
Same. Sometimes one of my deer will get thwacked by a car just hard enough it stumbles up my driveway and falls over. There will be 3 golden eagles and 2 bald eagles fighting over it. The first time I saw them I had a double-take ... I swore at first I saw men sitting on my driveway fence. Golden eagles are massive and quite awe inspiring to watch. When they fight over road kill they stretch their wings out entirely.
Each time I have to make sure I still have an outdoor cat and I have to keep an eye on him until they are done. They seem to only eat the soft bits and leave the muscle meat for the ravens. Then the deer turns into a fly factory which I have to spray.
Wow! What state is this in?
Wyoming, Rocky Mountains. Not far from Yellowstone.
We have a pair of kites that regularly land in a tree a few meters from my garden. They are beautiful looking creatures (even if not very beautiful sounding). It always lifts my spirits to see them. I hope the reintroduction of Eagles is similarly successful.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s we'd go on holiday in mid Wales, and I remember it being a big thing that it was the home of some of the last few red kites in the UK. Now I see dozens of them most times I drive around the south of England. Never gets old.
I live close to one of the bigger sites and they're so magnificent.
On the best days (like yesterday) I had them hovering over my garden, facing the wind, maybe 2-3 metres above the roof level.
So beautiful.
> Britain's second largest bird of prey
I don’t see it mentioned in the article but was our largest bird of prey?
EDIT: found it; the white tailed eagle[1].
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/white-tailed-eagl...
These 2 species of eagles are the biggest eagles in Europe.
Eagles are the biggest birds of prey which are active hunters.
A few species of vultures are much bigger than eagles, up to twice heavier.
In Europe, previously there was rather widespread a bird of prey that is intermediate in size and in appearance between eagles and true vultures, the so-called bearded vulture.
Unfortunately the bearded vulture and the true vultures have been exterminated in many parts of Europe by using poisoned dead animals.
For the bearded vulture, the Romans used a much better name, "ossifraga", which means "break-bones" (from which the word "osprey" comes, due to a confusion about the birds for which the name was used). The bearded vulture was called "break-bones", because it eats only bones, after breaking them by letting them fall on a rock from a great height.
Before the disappearances of the golden eagles and of the bearded vultures, they provided some of the most spectacular views in high mountains, due to their exquisite flying prowess.
I saw a condor in a bird sanctuary once. That’s a big ol’ boy!
The red kites are fun, I do enjoy seeing them and they are a great addition to biodiversity. However they also on occasion bring a packed lunch (see pigeon) to my garden, upon which time I either have to watch a somewhat horrifying nature documentary live, or in some cases they just leave an injured pigeon that I get guilt tripped into patching up and rehabilitating… I’m somewhat split about the situation…
Golden eagles have lived together with sheep-raising humans for millennia, without ever being anything else but a completely minor nuisance.
The reason is that sheep have always been guarded by shepherds and dogs.
The reintroduction of eagles can create problems only where lambs are completely unguarded, in order to save some money over the traditional methods.
So the choice between letting eagles live and exterminating them is not between raising sheep and not raising sheep, but between using a traditional level of care for them and a slightly cost-saving modern method, which has eliminated a part of the jobs associated with sheep raising.
A solution for the AI-hyped era, where paying human employees is frowned upon, would be to use robot dogs for scaring raptor birds.
Because this reply has been hidden in a sub-thread started by a flagged message, but I believe that this information should be more widely known, I repost my now hidden message, which replied to a very weird claim of someone else, that the golden eagle does not have cultural importance:
I do not understand to what you are referring by "is hardly known and of little importance culturally".
Your statement is completely unrelated with the parent article. Contrary to what you say, the golden eagle is by far the best known species of eagle and the one with the greatest cultural importance. In a large part of Eurasia, for at least 5 millennia or more the golden eagle has been the most culturally important species of bird.
The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is the species of eagle that has become the state symbol of the late Roman Republic and then of the Roman Empire.
Inspired by the Romans, during the last couple of millennia many other states have included the golden eagle in their heraldic symbols and several of them are still using it today.
Even much earlier than the Romans, at all Indo-European people the golden eagle had a special importance, being the bird used as a messenger by the God of the Sky, later known as Zeus in Greece and as Jupiter at the Romans. Already the Hittite texts from 3500 years ago have many references to the golden eagle.
The golden eagle is also the species that has been the most valued as a domesticated hunting bird in Central Asia.
The use of the "bald" eagle by USA has also been inspired by the Roman golden eagle, but the original species was replaced with a native American species. The golden eagles have survived in small pockets spread over a very large area from Western Europe to USA, so they were not representative for USA alone.
While the sea eagles, to which the American "bald" eagle also belongs, are bigger than the golden eagle (whose preferred habitat are the high mountains), the golden eagle is stronger for its size and she is able to hunt bigger prey in proportion to its size. Only some jungle eagles, like the harpy eagle, are definitely stronger and able to carry heavier prey.
[flagged]
Just FYI, you should have sympathy.
There's an enormous difference between weighing the pros and cons and coming to a different conclusion than somebody else, and having no sympathy for somebody else.
Sympathy doesn't simply mean "understanding"; that's one small aspect of the definition of a more complex word that also denotes emotional reflection.
Having weighed the pros and cons, I have come to the conclusion that the correct amount of (emotional) sympathy for the position of "we should kill all the eagles because farmers deserve only endless profits, never (minor) costs" is infinitesimal.
Just FYI...
There's an enormous difference between having no sympathy for an idea and having no sympathy for a person.
You say that - but its not your pocket being picked... when you have to put food on your families table, you probably aren't as worried about some bird nobodies ever heard of. No farmers - No food.
1. Eagles are very well-known.
2. Farms that keep sheep have more than one lamb.
3. The government doesn't, and shouldn't, intervene to protect people against every single risk they face in business.
1) This particular spotted big breasted eagle is hardly known and of little importance culturally. 2) Farm margins are very thin and its not up to you to dictate what an acceptable loss is. 3) Government has successfully in the past used hunting bounties to tame wilderness and increase farming productivity. The eradication of wolves in the great plains turned unremarkable scrub land into the most successful and productive era in farming the earth has ever seen. Maybe think about that next time you have a bite to eat and thank your local farmer.
I do not understand to what you are referring by "is hardly known and of little importance culturally".
Your statement is completely unrelated with the parent article. Contrary to what you say, the golden eagle is by far the best known species of eagle and the one with the greatest cultural importance.
The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is the species of eagle that has become the state symbol of the late Roman Republic and then of the Roman Empire.
Inspired by the Romans, during the last couple of millennia many other states have included the golden eagle in their heraldic symbols and several of them are still using it today.
Even much earlier than the Romans, at all Indo-European people the golden eagle had a special importance, being the bird used as a messenger by the God of the Sky, later known as Zeus in Greece and as Jupiter at the Romans. Already the Hittite texts from 3500 years ago have many references to the golden eagle.
The golden eagle is also the species that has been the most valued as a domesticated hunting bird in Central Asia.
The use of the "bald" eagle by USA has also been inspired by the Roman golden eagle, but the original species was replaced with a native American species. The golden eagles have survived in small pockets spread over a very large area from Western Europe to USA, so they were not representative for USA alone.
While the sea eagles, to which the American "bald" eagle also belongs, are bigger than the golden eagle, the golden eagle is stronger for its size and she is able to hunt bigger prey in proportion to its size. Only some jungle eagles, like the harpy eagle, are definitely stronger and able to carry heavier prey.
If a farm is economically endangered by a single-digit number of animals killed by natural predators, they have vastly more immediate problems to take care of.
Wasn't the eradication of wolves just the natural consequence of destroying the food source and way of life of the natives? Gotta get those people dead or moved if you're going to steal their land, amirite!
The average HN denizen has not grappled with the genocide of the natives in the United States.
Or in Palestine, for that matter.
The golden eagle is one of the most culturally significant birds worldwide; it's ridiculous to dismiss that.
There was nothing unremarkable about the great plains (note the name); they didn't produce the crop yield that you value, sure, but that's not the only possible metric to measure anything against.
I think farmers are great; I don't think we should exterminate countless species to save them from one of the extremely-predictable externalities of their jobs.
4. Farmers are already facing great difficulties from economic shocks like Brexit, Covid, Ukraine and Hormuz in a short span of time, and further strain is unwelcome.
Eagles are also dealing with other stuff (arguably more significant-- e.g. habitat loss), but that's an irrelevance to this issue.
The potential predations of a small number of eagles nationally will make very little difference to the enormous number of sheep kept by a large number of farmers. They can handle the strain, and if it's really somehow too much, there are mitigations short of extinction available to them.
There will always be some reason against a measure that doesn’t immediately benefit humans in the short term but yields benefits in the long term.
Im not sure how much sympathy they get about brexit!