118 BRITISH BIRDS. WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 
Family—FALCONIDA. 
WHITE-TAILED EAGLE. 
Flaliaétus albtcilla, LANN. 
LARGER and even more powerful bird than the Golden Eagle, with 
stronger beak, stouter legs, more formidable and cruel talons, and even 
greater extent of wing, but with no commensurate spirit, the White-tailed Eagle, 
with vulturine propensities, feeds chiefly upon what refuse fish and carrion it may 
discover upon the shore, or else watches the otter and waits until it leaves its 
captured salmon, or is glad to feast upon the dead sheep upon the hill side. Or 
it makes the feebler mammals its prey, the mountain hare and the rabbit, or the 
weakly lamb, sometimes pouncing on a Grouse, or robbing the nests of the Gulls 
and cliff birds of their young, sometimes making a raid upon the poultry yard, 
or, sailing out over the sea, striking and impaling upon its claws a basking fish. 
The Ravens pursue it, and strike at it, so do even Rooks and Gulls; the Great 
Skua, the well-known Bonxie, is dear to the shepherds, as this courageous bird 
will never permit the Eagle to approach its cliffs, and will not rest until it has 
driven it away. 
The lofty crags overhanging the sea are the White-tailed Eagle’s favourite 
station, whence it sallies forth to beat the shore in quest of food. Here it makes 
its eyrie, returning year after year to the same station. It was a more common 
bird than the Golden Eagle but, like that species, has suffered cruel persecution, 
and for a century or more has been exterminated in all its ancient haunts in 
-England and Wales. In old days it is said to have had eyries on Lundy Island, 
at the mouth of the Bristol Channel; on the Dewerstone Rock, near Plymouth; 
in the Isies of Wight and Man; in the Lake District, and probably in Wales; 
but at the present time any one who would wish to see it in a wild state must 
seek it in the Western Isles of Scotland. 
As the immature birds wander south in the autumn and winter the White-tailed 
Eagle is oftener seen in the South of England than the Golden Eagle, although 
adult birds are very rare; on the eastern coasts it is almost a regular autumnal 
visitor, and the writer has known of several instances of its occurrence of late 
years in Devon and Cornwall, and on the Quantock Hills in West Somerset. 
