ANOTHER LIFE: There's nothing so wild as a young eagle's eye. Even perched and passive in a cage, the bird's watch on the world was unmistakably tuned to hillside signals well beyond my ken., writes Michael Viney.
I admired the steel-blade sheen of the bill, the pristine edge of feathers springing soft and separate like the petals of chrysanthemums. They held the light softly in autumn colours: dark oak shoulder, russet mane.
The bird turned its head and peered deeply into my skull. And that, I thought, backing off from the last peephole, is the best close-up look I'll ever get at a really, really wild golden eagle.
There were 10 of them, ranged side by side in an aviary hidden at a secluded spot above the valley, far away from the castle and visitor centre, and the new magic box for zapping midges, which in Glenveagh National Park are a match for anything in the Scottish hills. They should help the eaglets, so competently kidnapped from nests across the Highlands, to feel at home in Donegal.
The birds are the latest recruits to a five-year programme of releases, begun in 2001, that will reintroduce golden eagles to Ireland. Already, up to 15 adult birds are roaming the mountains of Donegal and a further nine have wandered as far south as counties Leitrim and Sligo. Given their freedom this month, the new birds will help to build a native population with perhaps seven or eight breeding pairs. In their cages, the eaglets never saw or heard a human - dead rabbits and crows just appeared through a sleeve. Now they will eat from nearby food dumps, while they learn to hunt for themselves. By January, the free food will disappear.
The eagles' high rate of survival so far, tracked by wing markers and tiny radio-transmitters, reflects the preparation that went into the project, from taking stock of the potential prey to allaying the doubts of local sheep-farmers. The project's manager, Lorcan O'Toole, had already helped reintroduce the red kite in Scotland and England.
British nature conservationists have embraced reintroductions with enthusiasm. The plan to release great bustards from the Russian steppes on Salisbury Plain is the latest in a series of reintroductions that has included sea eagles in the Hebrides, ospreys in the Lake District, bitterns in East Anglia and choughs in Cornwall.
Not everyone approves. To Peter Marren, a leading British naturalist and writer on conservation, such programmes smack of "wildlife gardening" and risk damaging the essential "apartness" of nature. "The ospreys of Rutland or the eagles of Glenveagh," he suggests, "are birds with a definable use, like pretty Highland cattle, reared for the tourist's cameras more than for their meat." The real priority, he insists, is conservation of habitat, leaving the door open to natural recolonisation. His view is broadly shared by BirdWatch Ireland.
The pros and cons of reintroduction will be debated at next month's big wildlife conference, marking 25 years of the Irish Wildlife Trust, where Lorcan O'Toole will describe the eagle programme and naturalist Gordon D'Arcy will give the closing lecture. In his book Ireland's Lost Birds, D'Arcy lists goshawk, bittern and great spotted woodpecker among once-native species he thinks could possibly return. "Reintroduction - interaction or interference?" is his conference theme.
He has welcomed an enthusiastic proposal from the Irish Wildlife Trust that the great spotted woodpecker should be reintroduced to Ireland as "a major proactive conservation move". The IWT chairman, Conor Kelleher, is a bat expert who thinks that, by drilling holes in Ireland's conifers, the woodpecker would create homes for tree-dwelling bat species and make fresh openings for fungi and insects - thus filling "a glaring ecological niche missing from our woodlands". Wales would be his choice as the closest source of young woodpeckers.
But before the Countryside Council for Wales would licence their capture and export, they would have to be happy about Ireland's food supply. In the current issue of Wings, BirdWatch Ireland's magazine, Oran O'Sullivan wonders if past deforestation might have wiped out essential species of wood-boring beetles, along with tree-dwelling ants and other invertebrates.
Europe's common black woodpecker eats 900 wood-boring beetles and their larvae in a single feeding session, and O'Sullivan cites research to suggest that the variety and size of insects, which both diminish as one moves north and west in Europe, is what has limited the distribution of woodpeckers to Britain and Ireland.
Undismayed, the IWT is calling in international woodpecker expert Gerard Gorman to examine selected woodlands in our national parks. And its Irish wildlife conference, at Castle Durrow in Co Laois on September 24th-26th, promises to be a major event in assessing the state of the natural heritage, from habitats and flora to mammals, birds and invertebrates.
Details at www.iwt.ie.