i 3 2 DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



At a later date, the reward seems to have been commuted 

 into a fixed payment, for Laing in 1806, in his Voyage to 

 Spitsbergen, records that "a premium of three shillings and 

 fourpence is obtained for killing one of these eagles ["Earne- 

 eagles"]; and smaller premiums are given for lulling less 

 destructive birds." 



Nevertheless for a long time the Sea Eagle seems to have 

 held its ground with wonderful tenacity, and it is evidence 

 of the extraordinary rapidity with which a widely distributed 

 and common species may be exterminated that so late as 

 1871 Robert Gray, in his Birds of the West of Scotland, 

 should say of it, "Being a much commoner bird in Scotland 

 than the preceding species [the Golden Eagle], the Sea Eagle 

 has never been at any time in the same danger of extinction." 

 Yet in half a century, man has practically extirpated the Sea 

 Eagle in Scotland. The breeding places on Ailsa Craig and 

 I slay have long been deserted, Orkney is forsaken, and Skye, 

 where under sixty years ago a keeper killed fifty-seven 

 eagles in nine years, now harbours not a single individual. 

 Even in Shetland, where on the tiny island of Vemantry 

 the tenant told Low, about 1774, that he had killed seven 

 in a short time, the death-knell of the Sea Eagle has been 

 rung, for the male of the last pair was killed some years 

 ago, and since then the 



old female has returned year in, year out, to the old nest each spring to 

 gaze out over the wide horizon and wait. In the spring of 1916 she was 

 still alive at her post "just hanging about the old place as usual," solitary 

 for the rest of her days '. 



It is possible that the species still breeds in its last out- 

 post, the Outer Hebrides, but at best a few years will 

 probably see the end of the White-tailed Eagle of Scotland. 



VANISHED AND VANISHING HAWKS 



Hawks should perhaps be regarded as pests and vermin 

 rather than share a place with their nobler kin as destroyers 

 of domestic stock, but for the sake of unifying the treatment 

 of the birds of prey I include them here. In proportion to 

 their number, they have suffered heavily at the hand of man. 



1 Since these words were written this aged White-tailed Eagle of North 

 Roe has disappeared. It ceased to visit its old haunts in the season of 1918, 

 having probably died- -the last, it is said, of the Sea Eagles of the Shetlands. 



