128 DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



never yet killed any Sheep or Lamb in the Island, though the bones of 

 Lambs, of Fawns and Wild-Fowls are frequently found in and about their 

 nests, so that they made their Purchase in the opposite Islands ; 

 and Mr Robert Gray was informed by an observer that he 

 had seen the Eagles of South Uist "coming almost .daily from 

 Skye with a young lamb each to their eaglets" a distance 

 of about twenty-five miles. 



Such misdemeanours could not pass unnoticed, so the 

 tale of Dr Patrick Graham regarding southern Perthshire 

 in 1806, might be taken as an epitaph of the eagles through- 

 out the country. 



" The black eagle," he says, " has built her eyrie from time immemorial in 

 the cliffs of Benivenow [Ben Venue in Aberfoyle]; but by the exertions of 

 the tenantry, who suffered much loss from her depredations on their flocks, 

 the race is now almost extirpated." 



No wonder that the Golden Eagle had all but disappeared 

 in view of the terrible slaughter of its slow-breeding stock. 

 In five Aberdeenshire parishes, clustering about Braemar, 

 70 Eagles were slain in the ten years from 1776 onwards; 

 on the estates of Langwell and Sandside in Sutherlandshire, 

 295 old Eagles and 60 young Eagles and eggs were destroyed 

 in the seven years between 1819 and 1826; and rewards of 

 one guinea and ten shillings each respectively brought to 

 book 17 1 old Eagles and 53 young and eggs on the Duchess 

 of Sutherland's estate in the same county in the three years 

 1831 to 1834. 



The island of Hoy in the Orkneys, to which, about the 

 middle of the seventeenth century, an Eagle is said to have 

 carried unhurt from the mainland a swaddled child, has long 

 been deserted, for a price rested upon the bird's head 

 (see p. 1 30). So the Golden Eagle, which about two hundred 

 years ago built in Derbyshire, and a hundred years ago had 

 its eyrie amongst the Cheviot Hills, has been banished to 

 the lone islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides and to the 

 Highlands of the mainland. Fortunately a new sense of the 

 aesthetic value of the Eagle's magnificence has arisen to save 

 this noble bird from extermination, and a wise protection 

 has recently led to a gradual increase of its numbers and 

 extension of its range. At the present time, however, its 

 eastern limit may be traced in the wilds of the Grampians 

 at the head of the Dee, and its southern outposts in the 

 forests of northern Perthshire. 



