Even with only half a sky (the ridge behind us hides the rest), I live with more heaven than most. Out of doors, a part of me is always tuned upwards, to the familiar transit of crows and gulls, the soaring of pipits and larks.
Now and then, some novel trajectory catches my eye and I take time out to watch a purposeful peregrine or hovering kestrel. If my antennae are more than usually alert this spring, it is because of the very real chance of seeing my first golden eagle, arched two metres wide.
Reports from Glenveagh, the Donegal national park, suggest that, like ripples in a pond, the eagles released there since 2001 are spreading outwards. As the earliest young birds mature and claim the nearest mountains, the later first-year birds, brought in from Scotland, must fly further to find haunts of their own. At the end of January, last year's intake were denied their "free food" (dumps of dead rabbits and crows) and made to fend solely for themselves. So far this year, dispersed golden eagles have been reported from all four counties bordering Donegal - Tyrone, Fermanagh, Derry and Leitrim.
That leaves up to 15 eagles in Donegal and another nine roaming elsewhere. Last year brought sightings in north Kerry, more than 300km from Glenveagh, and others from Slieve Elva in the Burren and Letterfrack in Connemara. Lorcan O'Tooole, who manages the eagle project, has worked out the most likely route from Glenveagh to the western seaboard. His radio tracking of the eagles has already shown their attraction to the Blue Stack Mountains of Donegal.
On March 25th, a Sligo mountain rescue volunteer disturbed a large bird of prey - probably an eagle - from the cliff face of Knocknaree Mountain, on the peninsula west of Sligo town. This may show, says Lorcan O'Toole, how the released birds could pass south-west from the Dartry Mountains in Leitrim to the Ox mountains in Sligo, and beyond to Mayo and Galway.
Just where some of them may decide to settle down is suggested in a new work by Sean Lysaght, the naturalist and poet who lectures in the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology at Castlebar. His feeling for Mayo's wilder spaces and their missing birds produced an early poem, Golden Eagle: "The ledges are cold,/ the eyries drenched/ in the great desert of Erris/ where the last ones/ flew into extinction a lifetime ago/ above gillies and starvelings." Now, in a chapter for Science and Irish Culture, edited for the RDS by David Attis and Charles Mollan, he has explored the historical record of eagles in Mayo and their final, fatal persecution.
Typical of its documentary evidence is an account of the slaying of eagles as "vermin" at an eyrie on Mweelrea Mountain, just over the hill from me, in the 1860s. A Scottish sheep-rancher's wife, Mrs Boswell Houston, described how a local "cragsman" climbed to the eagle's nest above Doo Lough, grabbed the young eaglets and tied them down nearby. "Instinct, it was safely calculated, would soon lead the parent birds to the spot where their young had been conveyed, and, whilst ministering to their wants, it would be and was an easy matter for the Inverness-shire herd (burning with the desire to avenge the crime of lambecide) to shoot the splendid pair of eagles dead." The protection of grouse, as much as "lambecide", was, Lysaght judges, the spur to the wanton destruction of Mayo's golden eagles, which last bred in Mayo's Erriff valley in about 1912. And while he maps plenty of suitable breeding habitat for the birds on the mountains and high cliffs of the county's coast - perhaps eight "home ranges" between Mweelrea and north Mayo - he is apprehensive of their welcome. If they begin to reappear, he writes, "they will require careful and vigilant protection. The folk memory still regards these birds with suspicion, and sheep farmers in Mayo will need persuading that eagles are no threat to their stock." Around Glenveagh, the early consultation, and reassurance from the experience of Scottish sheep farmers, has brought the local IFA into the management programme. There is now, in any case, much less lambing on the hills, and the eagle's appetite for hooded crows, ravens and young foxes makes for good rural PR.
In February, indeed, the Northern wildlife cameraman, Brian Black, was out with Lorcan O'Toole on the slopes of Glenveagh and filming an eagle - code-named Red O - hovering persistently above something on the ground. Only when he viewed the long-lens footage on the screen did he realise what he'd got - an adult fox jumping up and snapping at its persecutor.
The eagles' activities and travels can be monitored at the project's excellent website, www.goldeneagle.ie.