White-Tailed Eagle Carries off lamb

JohnC6

JohnC6

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I wasn't sure which forum to post this in but Birds seemed the favourite. I was just reading this in today's newspaper ..the incident captured took place in April..and thought it would be of interest on here.

Photo-giant-bird-prey-lamb-claws-emerges-Scotland.html

Also, last month a dead Golden Eagle was found at a lamb carcass and it's injuries were compatible with an attack by another eagle..the talon injuries.. and the WTE was thought to be the offender as the witness saw them sparring in mid-air. I read in another article that in Norway they coexist without a problem

https://www.fginsight.com/news/news...illed-in-sea-eagle-attack-on-hill-flock-83822

In 2011 this photo was taken of a Golden Eagle taking a lamb. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...utches-lamb-Isle-Mull-razor-sharp-talons.html
 
If a golden eagle can take a hare or a fox it can take a lamb, and why wouldn't it if it was hungry and the lamb happened to be around? A white tailed is bigger again than a golden. It'd take a lamb easily and again why wouldn't it? As for co-existing - they'll only co-exist without problems if there's enough food around for all. If not there'll be conflict. The white tails seem to be very successful breeders too. This is why a lot of in depth study needs to be done before a species that was once native is re-introduced. And that's site specific study, not 'it works in Norway so it'll be fine in Scotland', or even 'it seems to be okay in Scotland so it's fine to do it in Wales'. Lynx, wolves, bears anyone................?
 
Jannyfox said:
I 'it seems to be okay in Scotland so it's fine to do it in Wales'. Lynx, wolves, bears anyone................?
Click to expand...

oh yes please indeed . dont need a hide I got a 4x4
 
the black fox said:
dont need a hide I got a 4x4
Click to expand...

So have I but I get out of it and go walking....................
Nothing against lynx, wolves or even bears (hmmm, let me just think about this........), it's just that they need to be here because they're desirable, fill a niche and don't risk wiping out another species that's already here but can't take the competition/predation, not just to fulfil someone's personal agenda.
I will enjoy seeing the white tailed eagles when we're in Scotland, and I always see them - you don't have to go looking for them - but I do get a much bigger buzz from seeing a golden eagle, mainly I suspect because though I have seen them, it happens so rarely.
 
I'm sure white tailed eagles will take lambs but how common it is, is difficult to gauge. From the article its not clear if the lamb was dead when the eagle took it.

A study a few years ago around Gairloch fitted some lambs with radio collars and none were taken by eagles - not that this proves lambs aren't taken. Also around the same area nests of WTE were examined and the species preyed upon most was fulmar. This surprised me but there are fewer fulmars around here now than a few years ago.

In theory re-introduction look a good idea. Have heard there is a push for the lynx in Scotland to limit the deer population and this might be a good idea. I am too sure about wolf and bear - the UK is not the country it was hundreds (think the last wolf was killed here in the 1600s) or thousands (last bear about 1500 to 2000 years ago?) of years ago.

Dave
 
Tringa said:
I'm sure white tailed eagles will take lambs but how common it is, is difficult to gauge. From the article its not clear if the lamb was dead when the eagle took it.

A study a few years ago around Gairloch fitted some lambs with radio collars and none were taken by eagles - not that this proves lambs aren't taken. Also around the same area nests of WTE were examined and the species preyed upon most was fulmar. This surprised me but there are fewer fulmars around here now than a few years ago.

In theory re-introduction look a good idea. Have heard there is a push for the lynx in Scotland to limit the deer population and this might be a good idea. I am too sure about wolf and bear - the UK is not the country it was hundreds (think the last wolf was killed here in the 1600s) or thousands (last bear about 1500 to 2000 years ago?) of years ago.

Dave
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I did wonder if that lamb was taken alive or was a carcass so I did a Google. This is a PDF file of a research programme carried out on the Isle of Mull. It's all interesting but to cut to the chase if you scroll down to Section 3 ..the heading is 'The numbers of lambs killed by WTE on Mull' ...and go subsection 3.4

I hope this url works.

https://www2.gov.scot/resource/doc/47060/0014566.pdf
 
Jannyfox said:
If a golden eagle can take a hare or a fox it can take a lamb, and why wouldn't it if it was hungry and the lamb happened to be around? A white tailed is bigger again than a golden. It'd take a lamb easily and again why wouldn't it? As for co-existing - they'll only co-exist without problems if there's enough food around for all. If not there'll be conflict. The white tails seem to be very successful breeders too. This is why a lot of in depth study needs to be done before a species that was once native is re-introduced. And that's site specific study, not 'it works in Norway so it'll be fine in Scotland', or even 'it seems to be okay in Scotland so it's fine to do it in Wales'. Lynx, wolves, bears anyone................?
Click to expand...


Re Norway,Jan, when I read that, it went through my mind that there must be a lack of competition for food.Their nesting habits differ too so no confrontation on that front either.

Here's another Research/PDF file and it addresses this very question at the outset.
a24788c4cfab29cbbdd48facf9a4374d52c8.pdf

It seems the purpose of introducing them to the Isle of Wight is the same as that for Scotland..Attracting visitors thus bosting the economy. Mull generates £5 million per annum and the Isle of Skye £2.5million per annum.

On the Isle of Mull II saw both the WTE and Golden Eagle soaring above me when I went there on photo so you will appreciate how much it grieves me when I saw a Golden Eagle ,caged ,at what I thought was an owl rescue centre here in Gloucester. It was standing on a metre wide metal bar with a leg chain and was clearly distressed. I once read an article on captive (especially caged) animals/birds and the author said that in future generations will look back at this practice with abhorrence. Let's hope so. Having said that, I appreciate that breeding programmes involving endangered species are the only hope for their continued existence.
 
JohnC6 said:
I did wonder if that lamb was taken alive or was a carcass so I did a Google. This is a PDF file of a research programme carried out on the Isle of Mull. It's all interesting but to cut to the chase if you scroll down to Section 3 ..the heading is 'The numbers of lambs killed by WTE on Mull' ...and go subsection 3.4

I hope this url works.

https://www2.gov.scot/resource/doc/47060/0014566.pdf
Click to expand...


Thanks for the link, John. I haven't read all of it yet but it looks interesting.

Dave
 
In regard to the re-introduction of large apex predators in Scotland, I heard an interesting comment made.

At the moment because of the 'right to roam' a land owner cannot restrict access to their land. But if they get a license for the introduction of say wolves on their land they will have to, as part of the license, completely fence off the area.......this stopping walkers exercising their 'right to roam'.

So the landowner is happy for various reasons especially stopping people using his land for recreational purposes!

I wonder how accurate/true that argument is?
 
JohnC6 said:
It seems the purpose of introducing them to the Isle of Wight is the same as that for Scotland..Attracting visitors thus bosting the economy. Mull generates £5 million per annum and the Isle of Skye £2.5million per annum.
Click to expand...

The White Tailed Eagles on Mull (and elsewhere) have been a success story. The reintroduction, following persecution to extinction, is primarily a consrvation measure that has produced a substantial tourism gain in some places which was not planned, but is certainly very positive.
WTE's, and more so Golden Eagles, are to be found in remote places where tourists will rarely spot them. They are subject to incessant persecution (have a look at https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/ )
The Mull study referred to is a bit dated, but I have not seen anything recent. Over the 3 year study period 8 pairs of WTE's took 114 lambs of which 85 were scavenged (carrion). The condition of the live lambs was not known. Of note is that the report mentioned that biggest improvement to increasing the viability of lambs would come from providing better nutrition for the ewe's and control of tick infestation (BTW tick's seem to a widespread problem now as many vets and animal owners well know).
 
arclight said:
The White Tailed Eagles on Mull (and elsewhere) have been a success story. The reintroduction, following persecution to extinction, is primarily a consrvation measure that has produced a substantial tourism gain in some places which was not planned, but is certainly very positive.
WTE's, and more so Golden Eagles, are to be found in remote places where tourists will rarely spot them. They are subject to incessant persecution (have a look at https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/ )
The Mull study referred to is a bit dated, but I have not seen anything recent. Over the 3 year study period 8 pairs of WTE's took 114 lambs of which 85 were scavenged (carrion). The condition of the live lambs was not known. Of note is that the report mentioned that biggest improvement to increasing the viability of lambs would come from providing better nutrition for the ewe's and control of tick infestation (BTW tick's seem to a widespread problem now as many vets and animal owners well know).
Click to expand...

Thanks for your response and for the link which I’ve read. Makes my blood boil. I dream of winning millions,buying grouse-shooting land, discontinuing the shoot and inviting the RSPB in to advise. I’d do the same on fox hunting land too.

On our last holiday in Cornwall, over Christmas/ New Year I returned to our car in the National Trust car park after photographing seals at Mutton Cove, Godrevey to discover my wife had signed us up to the National Trust. Here’s why I was unimpressed. Have a read of some of the comments too. I read that two thirds of illegal killing is carried out by gamekeepers ,clearly at the behest of the land owners.
https://markavery.info/2018/01/10/news-national-trust-grouse-shooting-peak-district/
 
JohnC6 said:
Thanks for your response and for the link which I’ve read. Makes my blood boil. I dream of winning millions,buying grouse-shooting land, discontinuing the shoot and inviting the RSPB in to advise. I’d do the same on fox hunting land too.

On our last holiday in Cornwall, over Christmas/ New Year I returned to our car in the National Trust car park after photographing seals at Mutton Cove, Godrevey to discover my wife had signed us up to the National Trust. Here’s why I was unimpressed. Have a read of some of the comments too. I read that two thirds of illegal killing is carried out by gamekeepers ,clearly at the behest of the land owners.
https://markavery.info/2018/01/10/news-national-trust-grouse-shooting-peak-district/
Click to expand...

Thanks John, it is disturbing. Detection and conviction rates for raptor persecution crimes verge on being non existent (and the sentences are pitifully low). If you sift through the RPUK entries you will see that a common problem is that it is usually several months after the discovery of raptor carcase that the police make it public and ask if anyone saw anything suspicious (to be fair, there are a very small number of police wildlife officers who are quick off the mark and credit to them for this).
Lethal poisons are used which could kill a human. A child touching that stuff and puting then fingers in their mouth ......... curtains!
 
Tringa said:
I'm sure white tailed eagles will take lambs but how common it is, is difficult to gauge. From the article its not clear if the lamb was dead when the eagle took it.

A study a few years ago around Gairloch fitted some lambs with radio collars and none were taken by eagles - not that this proves lambs aren't taken. Also around the same area nests of WTE were examined and the species preyed upon most was fulmar. This surprised me but there are fewer fulmars around here now than a few years ago.

In theory re-introduction look a good idea. Have heard there is a push for the lynx in Scotland to limit the deer population and this might be a good idea. I am too sure about wolf and bear - the UK is not the country it was hundreds (think the last wolf was killed here in the 1600s) or thousands (last bear about 1500 to 2000 years ago?) of years ago.

Dave
Click to expand...
True but Scotland has a lower population density than India and they have tigers, lions etc there.
 
JohnC6 said:
It seems the purpose of introducing them to the Isle of Wight is the same as that for Scotland..Attracting visitors thus bosting the economy.

Jannyfox said:
And this, sadly, is what influences the general public's view of wildlife, and rural areas in general.
Click to expand...

Very true. On a related subject, but with a slightly different angle, the NC500 was introduced to boost the economy in NW Scotland. However, in the most recent edition of the local paper here a group for local businesses is looking to see what they can do to encourage Slow Tourism.

Dave
 
Janny can I have the lynx please,no hides no 4be4 just some lynxes and me:)

Terribly difficult this,I want pretty much all of our lost natives back,so would welcome the whitetails. i've also been a stockman in the domestic livestock industry....sort of farming.

I watched the country file report on this last night, I felt their coverage very balanced : I couldn't help feel for those farmers whom seem to be getting hammered by the eagles. I used to rear birdz domestic poultry I showed and it was also my livelyhood. I can't articulate the heartache of finding birds dead to a predator attack,the years and years that went into getting so far and to have everything reduced back to square one.....or the horror of a mass kill at work where in a night we lost thousands of pounds and hundreds of birds. We can compensate farmers for a monetary loss but not for the loss of the special individual animals,they have spent so much effort in breeding.

I think we are basically at a place where if we reintroduce our lost top ....apex predators then it's pretty much a given that some poor folks will suffer,I utterly understand that and what that suffering would feel like, and yet still I want the eagles.

We can't really moan about the loss of a few lambs (ok we can and i've tried to illustrate how that might feel to me on a personal level i've pulled these from their mum) and expect folks to live with other apex predators in other countries. Other apex predators might not only take a lamb they might take a child.

I understand the need for impact studies,I understand the loss to a farmer ( 7 years work wiped out in a night, I really understand the effects of predation)
But we have to own the fact that if we want to breed without check then there is only so much room in the world for the other stuff that lives on our planet.

I guess the individual will take a hit for the greater good here......... the greater good being the eagles and their effect on an unbalanced environment which could also be a cause for concern.

I didn't think the sea eagles were reintroduced to scotty for tourism, I thought that was utterly ecological,tourism a by product ??

Eagles down south talk of Lynx to control boar.... it's positive but it won't be easy,for a few !!

stu
 
Stuart Philpott said:
Janny can I have the lynx please,no hides no 4be4 just some lynxes and me:)

Terribly difficult this,I want pretty much all of our lost natives back,so would welcome the whitetails. i've also been a stockman in the domestic livestock industry....sort of farming.

I watched the country file report on this last night, I felt their coverage very balanced : I couldn't help feel for those farmers whom seem to be getting hammered by the eagles. I used to rear birdz domestic poultry I showed and it was also my livelyhood. I can't articulate the heartache of finding birds dead to a predator attack,the years and years that went into getting so far and to have everything reduced back to square one.....or the horror of a mass kill at work where in a night we lost thousands of pounds and hundreds of birds. We can compensate farmers for a monetary loss but not for the loss of the special individual animals,they have spent so much effort in breeding.

I think we are basically at a place where if we reintroduce our lost top ....apex predators then it's pretty much a given that some poor folks will suffer,I utterly understand that and what that suffering would feel like, and yet still I want the eagles.

We can't really moan about the loss of a few lambs (ok we can and i've tried to illustrate how that might feel to me on a personal level i've pulled these from their mum) and expect folks to live with other apex predators in other countries. Other apex predators might not only take a lamb they might take a child.

I understand the need for impact studies,I understand the loss to a farmer ( 7 years work wiped out in a night, I really understand the effects of predation)
But we have to own the fact that if we want to breed without check then there is only so much room in the world for the other stuff that lives on our planet.

I guess the individual will take a hit for the greater good here......... the greater good being the eagles and their effect on an unbalanced environment which could also be a cause for concern.

I didn't think the sea eagles were reintroduced to scotty for tourism, I thought that was utterly ecological,tourism a by product ??

Eagles down south talk of Lynx to control boar.... it's positive but it won't be easy,for a few !!

stu
Click to expand...
I agree ideally there would be a state or charity scheme to compensate farmers for the loss.
How do you lose hundreds of birds at once?
 
Tringa said:
JohnC6 said:
It seems the purpose of introducing them to the Isle of Wight is the same as that for Scotland..Attracting visitors thus bosting the economy.
Dave
Click to expand...

No, that's not the purpose of the re-introduction. The purpose is to bring back species that were once native and were wiped out by our ancestors. Tourism is a side-effect (although a very welcome one) as Stuart says above.

There has to be a way of compensating farmers for their losses and the costs of doing so should be built in to the project funding at the outset. There must be examples abroad where this has happened. It's amazing toi think that Scottish sea-eagles will soon be seeding re-introduction projects elsewhere in the UK!
 
davholla said:
I agree ideally there would be a state or charity scheme to compensate farmers for the loss.
How do you lose hundreds of birds at once?
Click to expand...


David I worked with rare breeds of poultry,around 250 breeds of chuck,plus most of the rare breeds of ducks geese and turkeys were in amongst my charges along with some piggies and sheep.

At my peak I was setting around a 1000 eggs per weeks taking off roughly 60% as a hatch. these would be reared intensively indoors until around 6 weeks old when they would go out side,into big low....say 8'X4' brooders. The brooders were all inside roughly 20 acres of fox proof fence,done pretty well I might add,metal posts turn out at top and bottom.

A fox somehow got in to the site at night,he didn't get into the brooder,but he could get a paw in. Simply all the occupants piled up at the other end in terror and suffocated each other. The fox did manage to get to some, but it's the pile ups with numbers of birds that is the problem in these situations. If i recollect correctly 125 birds per brooder. It's a while ago now David but trust me it was carnage. He hit brooder after brooder after brooder. I'd have all my young together on one "new"area of ground each season,so once he was in, he was with hundreds and hundreds of young birds . Each brooder essentially also fox proof but still utter carnage because of the way multiples of birds react in this type of situation and the way the predator reacts.

One can't really blame the fox,these mass kills happen because we ( man ) have an artificially high number of birds in one place the predator goes into kill overload mode due to the utterly unnatural stimuli, and the results tare ya bloody heart out. The lady sheep farmer on countryfile was suffering you could see what she was going through, with her lambs,it was hard to watch for me. I understand being up all our all weathers out all hours trying to do the best for one's animals, it's incredibly hard going through this type of thing .

This happens with free range poultry,waterfowl collections and of course game keepers also have problems at the release pen stage. It's not oft that a collection is as big as the place I worked ,so the carnage was naturally huge.

David,in part that's my point we can estimate a cost, a value of an animal, to compensate a farmer. But that isn't what the farmer has plausibly lost: breeding programmes can take years to come to fruition it's way more than just a lost lamb in some cases.

It's not an easy thing evaluating compensation, that lady farmer on country file isn't just loosing money it's her whole world being ripped apart.

Hard stuff this !!
 
Stuart Philpott said:
David,in part that's my point we can estimate a cost, a value of an animal, to compensate a farmer. But that isn't what the farmer has plausibly lost: breeding programmes can take years to come to fruition it's way more than just a lost lamb in some cases.

It's not an easy thing evaluating compensation, that lady farmer on country file isn't just loosing money it's her whole world being ripped apart.

Hard stuff this !!
Click to expand...
Thanks for the explanation. I didn't know that the birds reacted like that.
 
Dave very brief,flocks of birds of this type do strange things....water fowl will actually go towards a fox as a group . It's said that a fox will briefly show it's self and then vanish drawing the ducks in the fox repeats the breif show and dissappears until the ducks come within range for an attack. Somewhat annecdotal I know that said I've seen this at work, once.

What I thought might possibly be of interest and where this gains more substance is that this tactic was used by wildfowlers in the past with a fox coloured dog. Essentially this technique is still in use today by conservation organisations to lure birds in for ringing etc...................the duck decoy at Slimbridge an example of this very old technique.

I won't go further i'll take the thread away from it's topic which is important !! It would be easy to find out more from the WWT, I just thought it might interest you

You are very welcome:),
 
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