Restocking the skies

I was straightening up from the rain gauge, a bottle of Atlantic showers in hand, when this distant, odd silhouette caught my eye, flying towards the ridge between here and Doolough Pass. Squinting hard at a tail-on shape a kilometre or so away (wrong glasses, and no binoculars handy), I sharpened up a bird the size of a great black-backed gull, trailing something silvery from the tips of long white legs.

I'm happy to have thought it an osprey with a fish (perhaps a mullet from the channel) and looking for a tree to use as a picnic table. Doolough has its favourite Scots pines, not to mention lakes full of salmon, and nearby Killary Harbour is a fjord just waiting for the swish of the fish eagle's wings, the eager stretch of talons.

But you don't have to live among lakes to hope for a wandering osprey. On several days last month, one was roaming Dublin Bay and visible even from Sandymount. It's still a rare bird and likely to remain so for a good while, but sightings have increased steadily, especially in Ulster and the western lakes, and the Irish nesting of ospreys is clearly a matter of time.

It may already have happened. The revival of ospreys has been one of the great conservation successes in Scotland, with more than 150 birds fledging each year and migrating to winter in Africa. The revival depended very substantially on providing the birds with nest-sites, and the bare crowns of Scots pines, their first choice, have sometimes had to be simulated by artificial platforms.

Fifteen of these are now on offer at some of our northern lakes, built there by the RSPB, BirdWatch and Duchas, and in 1997 ospreys were recorded in no fewer than eight of our counties, mostly in the spring when the Scottish birds were returning from Africa.

The glorious sight of a golden eagle spreading its wings on the front page of this newspaper a week or two ago was confirmation of another thrilling new shape for the sky. Up to 75 young birds from Scotland will be released at Glenveagh National Park in Co Donegal over a five-year period: a sustained attempt at reintroduction after almost a century of extinction.

This is a serious commitment, not least by Scottish Natural Heritage, who have licensed the collection of the chicks from eyries in remote mountain areas of the Highlands. Each will be taken from a two-chick nest at about six to seven weeks - old enough to keep itself warm and to take food placed on a nest platform in a very large cage, by humans they never see.

Young eagles depend on their parents for food for several months, so that, even after release, food will "appear" on the roofs of the cages and then at a dump nearby. Slowly, as they learn to hunt grouse, hares and rabbits, they will be weaned into the wild.

Seventy-five chicks may seem a great many to invest in the project, but up to 80 per cent of eagle fledglings do not last the five years it takes to reach breeding age. A good outcome would be three or four pairs of eagles, nesting between Muckish Mountain in the north to the Glendowan Mountains in the south. Eventually, with good management and effective control of poisons, the species could once again rule the skies from Donegal to Kerry.

With its huge, seven-foot wingspan the golden eagle should be unmistakable, even though its sheer effortlessness of flight can often make it seem smaller. But until we have had the chance of matching it to the Irish landscape, there will probably be confusion with another broad-winged bird of prey.

The common buzzard is a lot smaller and dumpier than the eagle, but its soaring, spiralling display is still exhilarating to watch. As it spreads its numbers as an Irish breeding bird, encounter is likely across the whole of Ulster and, increasingly, down the east coast. In Donegal, its nesting pairs will actually share the same sky as the eagles, and there it should soon be possible to compare the easy, slow-motion circles of the eagle with the buzzard's rapid wheeling.

The eagle's head is small in proportion to its size; the buzzard's large and close to the front edge of the wings. And the golden eagle never, ever perches on a pole.

Larger than a buzzard, but with a shape and style all its own, the red kite is another raptor beginning to spill over into Irish airspace from successful restoration in Wales. Its wings are long and angled, the long tail deeply notched and fanned and twisted as a rudder in an agile, buoyant flight (this is where the toy kite came from).

The kite, like the buzzard, is specially vulnerable to farmers' poisons. But if that threat can be curbed, says Chris Mead in a new book, The State of the Nations' Birds the outlook for kites is "brilliant", with perhaps 2,500 pairs by 2010.

Mead gives smiley-faced symbols to nearly all the raptors among the 250 UK and Irish species whose fortunes he assesses - two smiles, indeed, for the prospects of the marsh harrier, once the commonest large raptor in Ireland. It was exterminated as a breeding bird by drainage and shooting, but has been making a vigorous comeback in the UK and is a rare but regular visitor to southern Ireland - even sometimes, in spring, to reed-swamps of the sort it used to nest in.

After a lifetime of work for the British Trust for Ornithology, Chris Mead is a shrewd judge of the prospects for birds and their habitats. For every species saved or restored by human conservation effort, or enjoying a boom all its own, there seems to be another slipping towards scarcity or worse. But Mead is not a doomsayer and this is a balanced overview of both islands, full of readable and worthwhile detail. Published by Whittet Books at £12.99 in the UK.