The Monarch 
of the Air. 
THE BIRD WORLD, 
( 105 ) 
The Monarch of the Air, 
A Thrilling Story of the Hunting of the Golden 
Eagle in Sutherlandshire. 
There are not a few Golden Eagles 
left in Sutherlandshire and other parts 
of North Britain. In the deer forests 
they are welcome chiefly because they 
help to keep a check on the Grouse, 
which have so bad a habit of upsetting 
the stalker’s best-laid plans by rising 
with a big noise at the wrong moment, 
and so alarming the deer. It is, how¬ 
ever, still possible to go Eagle-nesting 
by the end of March, before the mountain 
snows have melted, if only one can get 
into the good graces of a deerkeeper or 
a shepherd, who generally has his own 
opinion about Eagles and hates them 
as vermin. Although not a few clutches 
of eggs are hatched off safely year by 
year, the Eaglets, when half-grown at 
the age of four weeks, are often taken 
by the natives. In places not easily 
accessible the mother-bird may first 
have to be withdrawn by the device, 
commonly used, of a truss or bundle of 
cotton wool secured to a rope. Whep 
the bundle is lowered into the eyrie the 
old bird, turning on her back, strikes 
upwards with her talons and fastens 
her claws so tightly into it that her 7-lb. 
weight can be hauled up or flung aside 
out of the way until, by dint of a little 
careful downward climbing, the Eaglets 
are secured. What may be their ulti¬ 
mate fate depends on the designs of the 
climbers. 
Eagles and Their Age. 
One day, says a writer in the “ Man¬ 
chester Guardian,” when snow lay deep 
in the corries, my friend Aquila Scott 
and I were joined by a deerkeeper 
named Allan Macgregor, and together 
we set off on our search. We had not 
proceeded very far when Aquila called 
out, “Oh, look you! Yonder he sails! 
The Golden Eagle ! ” About three miles 
away, rising sheer from the mountain 
side, a peculiar pinnacle of rock pierced 
the sky. It appeared to me that from 
this very pinnacle the Eagle had swooped 
down into the plain, taking two or three 
spiral turns when near the valley as if 
to break the impetus. A little while, 
and we beheld him rising from the 
valley with some creature of no great 
weight gripped between his talons, and 
we watched him sail through the air in 
the direction of the pinnacle. This was 
now our destination. Allan Macgregor 
said it had been used as a landmark by 
a pair of Eagles throughout the greater 
part of his lifetime. Eagles, he said, 
lived often to a very great age and estab¬ 
lished themselves in a neighbourhood for 
life, annexing the whole property; and 
he knew that a pair made their nest just 
at the pinnacle’s base. Definite infor¬ 
mation of the kind is most useful to 
earnest naturalists in want of eggs, else 
they may have to wander about in peri¬ 
lous places above snow-line for hours in 
hope of flushing a bird before they can 
get some clue to the position of her 
nest. 
On the March. 
Far in the distance were snow-capped 
peaks and a steely-grey loch on whose 
surface Allan said he had often shot 
wild Swans in winter-time. Pre¬ 
sently we were up to our knees 
in the water at its shallowest ford ; 
then we went panting on all fours 
up to the screes and through the 
pine trees on the steep slope above 
the rivulet’s left bank. It was no easy 
matter to force a passage through the 
tall fronds of last season’s bracken, 
though we were charmed into making 
work feel comparatively easy by the 
music of a Ring-Ousel perched on a 
rowan bush. 
