34 HILL BIRDS OF SCOTLAND 



think, that the eagle is, of all the birds, the one most 

 nearly approaching human intelligence. 



There is an old Gaelic narrative of how the birds once 

 upon a time agreed to make king the one which should fly 

 highest. The eagle expected to win, but the wren chal- 

 lenged it. The eagle, soaring out of sight into the sky, 

 cried out, " Cait am bheit thu nis a Dhreathan duinn ? " 

 " Wliere are you now, little wren ? " But the wren had 

 secretly perched on the eagle's back before he had started, 

 and now flew up still higher, calling as he flew, " Fad fad 

 OS do cheann." " Far, far above you." So the wren was 

 made king. I was recently conversing with an old High- 

 land stalker on the eagle, and he assured me that it 

 renewed its youth every seven years, and had indeed 

 discovered the secret of perennial youthfulness. He stated 

 that the eagle's bill is renewed every seven years, and with 

 the renewal of the bill the whole body is renovated also. 

 A quaint theory this of the old hill-man's, yet I believe 

 this idea is widely prevalent among the older generation. 



Fights between eagles are rare — they seem to rise 

 superior to the quarrels of lower humanity — yet on one 

 occasion an eagle was captured by a sheep dog Avhilst 

 fighting on the ground with a rival. Another instance 

 occurred of two eagles fighting so savagely that they 

 became interlocked, and could not separate. 



Although, as I said before, the eagle is holding its own 

 in Scotland at the present day, this is entirely due to 

 the increase of land given over to deer. Were it not for 

 the 3,000,000 acres of deer forests Scotland possesses, the 

 eagle would by now have shared the fate of the Osprey 

 and the Sea Eagle ; for during the earlier part of last cen- 

 tury a very large number of Golden Eagles were destroyed. 

 From March 1831 to March 1834 in Sutherland alone as 

 many as 171 old birds and 53 eggs and 3'oung were taken, 

 and a little earlier — between 1820 and 1826 — 295 old birds 



