GOLDEN EAGLE'S NESTING

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 16

GOLDEN EAGLE'S NESTING

A LEISURELY AFFAIP,

On 27th January some years ago I was on .the outskirts of a Scottish deer forest, writes Seton Gordon, F.Z.S., in the "Daily Mail." There was a mildness in the air seeming_to hold the promise of spring-tide. Through the pine trees the south-west wind sighed; across the hilltops, deep in snow, the mjsts raced in a grey and ghostly company. All at once I saw a dark form against the sombre sky. As it approached I watched the superb flight that showed it to be a golden eagle and noticed that the bird was carrying in its bill a large fir branch:' The wind caught at this branch, causing the great bird to sway in its, flight as the adverse squalls struck it. Across the glen the eagle flew, making for a small cliff where the eyrio is built and added to each spring. Arrived at the nest the bird placed the branch in position, looked at it a second or two, then launched out on its broad wings and sailed away to hunt. The golden eagle ia perhaps the most leisurely nest builder of all British birds. Tho nest I have written of was nearly coven weeks in the building, for it was not untiltlio sixteenth day of March that I saw tho first egg in the nest. There was brilliant sunshine in tho glen that day and the air was warm as at midBunimer, but the hills were more deeply covered in snow than in January, and seemed in the cloudless sky like the icy peaks of Spitsbergen, where the snow, oven at mjdsmmer, is unbroken. The eagle's eyrie was lined with living fir branches, fresh and green as when they were stripped from their tree. The golden eagle is unusually careful and discriminating in its choice of nesting materials. The foundation of the eyrie js of dead branches. The eggs Ha always upon a bod of a green rush-like plant called Luzula sylvatjca, and the outer edges of the eyrie are invariably composed of green fir branches, if a fir'tree is anywhere within a radius of four miles. I remember once finding a single Scots fir up a lonely.side glen. An eagle's eyrie was in the main glen below and evidently the two birds had paid frequent visits to this tree, for its branches were scarred and disfigured, and one could see where strong claws and bills had torn off the lesser shoots. The stolen eagle is .first of all the birds of the high Scottish hills to nest, lhe eagles are independent of weather; they can hunt the white hare and snowy ptarmigan during a time of numbin" frost and deep snow, when lesser birds are starving or almost so. It is because of this that their nesting is early, and I have seen a. golden eagle brooding her eyrie with, an average depth of more than two feet of snow ou tho ground.