How birds of prey could soar in population

Another Life:As the heavens open and the winds howl and we know it's all our own fault, there's a wry note to the prospect that great birds of the air will again rule the skies above Ireland.

As concrete and conifers creep across the island, the restoration of our birds of prey can seem an almost quixotic endeavour. But some seek to repair the world even as others mess it up, and the flight of eagles and allied raptors gives some sort of guarantee that nature's food chains are still working.

The Irish Raptor Study Group has published what, even a couple of decades ago, might have read like a hopelessly optimistic manifesto. But the success of restoring golden eagles to the northwest mountains, and the wholly natural spread of the buzzard across Ireland, gives great hope for its programme of restoration - not only of "historical" birds of prey but those currently given a lean time in the countryside, such as hen harrier and barn owl.

The 19 birds in the group's booklet, Birds of Prey and Owls in Ireland, include a few wild cards, such as the snowy owl, which bred - unsuccessfully - in Donegal's Glenveagh National Park in 2001, and the hobby, which is taking an increasing fancy to the north Wicklow coast.

But it is good to be reminded of birds that are beginning to recolonise by themselves: the goshawk, for example, once the star of Ireland's medieval woodland predators, and marsh harrier, once common in our wetlands. As Scotland's ospreys increase, their migrations take regular routes across Ireland's midland and western lakes. Red kites come visiting too. And the buzzard, now almost liberated from poisoning and shooting, continues to spread from its Ulster bridgehead towards every Irish county.

All this adds to the excitement of the next reintroduction "spectacular" - that of the white-tailed (or sea) eagle, extinguished about a century ago from the cliffs and islands of the west. The first 15 chicks, taken under special licence from nests in Norway this summer, will be fledged and released in the autumn from cages in Killarney National Park. As with the golden eagle reintroduction at Glenveagh, the process will be repeated for a further four years. The sheer number of chicks and persistence of annual releases needed for success has been a major lesson of raptor reintroduction.

In the Scottish white-tailed eagle programme, for example, based on the Isle of Rum in the mountainous Inner Hebrides, 82 eaglets from Norway were released over a decade from 1975. The necessary scale and duration of effort helps to explain the futility the attempt to establish the eagle on Charles Haughey's Blasket island, Inishvickillane, with a pair of young, captive-bred birds brought from Germany in 1991 (the male was washed up dead after storms; the female disappeared).

Prospects for the Killarney project, developed through the Golden Eagle Trust with the help of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, were well vetted in advance by Norwegian ornithologists, who found in the Iveragh Peninsula and offshore islands an ideal habitat, its food supply ample even in winter.

Apart from the eagle's celebrated skill at snatching feeding fish from the surface of lake or sea, it preys on seabirds and has a vulture's eye for carrion: a dead seal on the shore or dead sheep on a hillside are equally welcome. It is also notably adept at bullying otters into dropping their fish.

The conservation biologist managing the project is Dr Allan Mee, a native of Limerick who worked on the Scottish sea eagle programme but who comes fresh from years of involvement with one of the biggest birds of all - the Californian condor.

After the condor's absence in the wild for some 20 years and a captive breeding programme in San Diego Zoo, its reintroduction was not without behavioural problems: Mee found the first wild chicks being fed bits of glass and bottle tops by their parents, sometimes with disastrous effect.

In Co Kerry, the problems are more likely to lie with the farmers, whose attitude towards raptor conservation (notably of the hen harrier) has been, at times, luridly unsympathetic. Along with their ready concern for newborn lambs goes the fear that farmland, far beyond Killarney National Park, would be designated for conservation, limiting its value for sale or development.

In consultation meetings with farming groups, the eagle project's scientists have been able to quote Scottish research showing that vast majority of hill lambs taken by sea eagles are already dead, and those taken as live prey comprise a very small share of overall lamb mortality.

The Kerry members of the Irish Farmers' Association who visited Glenveagh at the start of the month should have felt reassured - not least by the contingency fund available for compensation. And in the scale of everyone's reckoning is the potential return from eagle-watching tourism, which on the Isle of Mull is reckoned to put some €3 million annually into the local economy.