Within the wilds of the Morvern Peninsula in the West of Scotland, our Rahoy Hills Wildlife Reserve is home to a huge array of wildlife including from red deer to rich arctic-alpine flora. One of the highlights is golden eagles which nest and breed on the reserve. In this series of blogs, we hear from Steve Hardy, Ranger on Rahoy Hills, about his experience monitoring the eagle nest this year. You can find part one of the series here and part two here.

As thrilling as it always is to find the eagles nesting, it is these days tinged with sadness. The reserve pair have not raised to chick since 2018, even though they have made breeding attempts most years between then and now. They are laying and sitting for the duration of the incubation period, but failing soon after the hatch date. I don’t and can’t put in 24/7 watches at the nests, so can’t conclusively say what happens for sure, but I believe it is that they are not able to find enough food. It is not just this pair, many pairs in the region are doing the same, breeding, laying eggs, completing the incubation period, but failing. There is next to no prey for them on these western hills. They do better further east, where there are grouse and mountain hares. Golden eagles are a top of the food chain predator, an indicator species, and that they are not doing well is telling us that the food chain is in poor health, the hills are devoid of life, and it’s this that we are trying to address and put right. It’s going to take a long time, so it may be that we lose the golden eagle as a breeding bird for a while, but they would come back as there is always a surplus of immatures from the east looking to move into vacant territories. If we can restore biodiversity to the hills and with it a diverse prey range then eagles would once again successfully live where they have for many centuries.

As well as lack of food, adverse weather conditions at critical times of the year is also affecting them, and the availability of their prey. One of the nests on the reserve was literally washed away during a winter deluge. The nest has been there for decades, maybe hundreds of years, and eagles don’t nest under waterfalls. But the rain during that atrocious spell was so heavy it was finding ways and paths down off the hill that it wouldn’t normally have, and it washed the nest and the ledge it was on completely away. Another nest on another territory was blown off the cliff face with a chick in the nest during a storm in May. Also, a series of cold late springs has meant that bird prey species have returned to the hills later than they normally would, and numbers have dropped away due to poor breeding success in bad weather. Even common formally abundant species like meadow pipits are so thin on the ground now. This has all impacted on the abundance and availability of food for eagles.

I will be checking the eagles every ten days or so throughout the incubation period. I hope that they are not disturbed and that the weather isn’t too hostile for them and they make it through to hatch. They sit for 42 to 45 days. If they get that far then I can only hope that somehow, they find enough prey and that they successfully fledge a chick. It has been a long time since I heard the hungry calls of a young eagle in late summer or seen one on the wing with its parents. They are evocative sights and sounds, belonging to the mountains, one’s I don’t know if I will ever hear and see again in my life time.

Our hills are crying out for the chance to recover. They would and will with our help, there are examples of it elsewhere, and that’s a road we are on right now, not just on the reserve, but across the wider landscape, working collaboratively with landowners, farmers, and stalkers in ways that don’t have to mean the end to ways of life or jobs, but a change in practices for a new and vital objective. Nature restoration and climate change mitigation go hand in hand. What we want to do for nature and the reasons why will ultimately benefit us too. Restoring nature’s health will give us the best chance of a future.

6 April, I checked the eagles again. The light was bad, hazy with a heat shimmer, and I was a bit further away and higher up this time. I looked for long periods through the scope. Is that a bird’s head above the nest rim? I had a break, and looked again. The nest looked different, there must have been a bird on and it must have come off. As I looked through the scope a bird came to the nest with talons full of dry Molinia to add to the lining of the nest. This bird settled to incubate quite quickly, and I could see this bird much more easily than the one that had been on. The bird on now was the female, a bigger bird than the male, with a lighter blonder golden head. The male has a darker golden head, and being smaller, is less easy to make out on the nest. They’d had a changeover. The male was on when I arrived, the female was on when I left. All was well.

On my way back I passed a lovely lochan I had not been to before, but had seen many times in the distance, just off the reserve. On it were a pair of courting little grebes. It was an idyllic seen in today’s sunny weather. I truly hope it’s a better spring and summer for our breeding birds.