In April, Defra proudly announced £1m of funding to explore the reintroduction of golden eagles to England, with the possibility of this taking place as early as next year. This follows a successful project that translocated golden eagles into the Southern Uplands of Scotland from the Highlands.
As an environmentalist with a yearning to see Britain’s ecosystems and their functionality restored, and a strong advocate for rewilding, this announcement seemed almost tailor-made to appeal to me. Except… it didn’t.
A history of persecution
Golden eagles were extirpated from England and Wales during the mid-19th century, due to persecution by sheep farmers, grouse shoots and egg collectors. They clung on in the Scottish Highlands and Outer Hebrides, slowly recovering as persecution decreased, but remained absent from England until a few sporadic sightings and breeding attempts in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Cheviot Hills and the Lake District.
This recolonisation was short-lived, with breeding pairs at these sites mostly succumbing to illegal trapping, shooting or poisoning. The most recent pair in England occupied the Lake District, with the female dying in 2004 and the male in 2016.
Since then, the translocation project in southern Scotland has reinforced a small and isolated population there, to around 50 eagles, which are now occasionally crossing the border into England. This begs the question: is an active reintroduction to England necessary?
A natural recolonisation scenario
A recent feasibility report into the recovery of golden eagles in England looked at suitable habitats, capable of supporting breeding populations, and arrived at a final selection of eight Potential Recovery Zones (PRZs). Most of these were in the northern uplands, with one notably distinct zone in the southwest.
The report models a natural recolonisation scenario, predicting that eagles could disperse via the Cheviots southwards to the Pennines, from there to the Lakes and potentially have breeding pairs in the Yorkshire Dales within 20 years. This would, theoretically, be limited mainly by natal dispersal distances – that is, the distance between an eagle’s natal nest and its first breeding, which isn’t especially large in golden eagles – less than 30km for males.
They also don’t like crossing bodies of water, so direct colonisation of the Lake District from across Solway Firth is unlikely. Nevertheless, natural recolonisation of England could take place over the next several decades.
It would be impossible on any foreseeable timescale for golden eagles to naturally reach habitats in the Southwest of England, so there may be a case for a reintroduction there, pending assessments of prey availability and stakeholder engagement.
Even so, because of its isolation and the limited number of territories it offers, the report cautions that this may require regular supplementation with new birds unless, for instance, a reintroduction also takes place in South Wales to provide a larger metapopulation – although gene flow between the two regions would still be low because of the obstacle presented by the Severn Estuary.
This is a very different proposition, of course, from the recent reintroduction of white-tailed eagles to the Isle of Wight, with further reintroductions planned in Exmoor. This species was previously extinct in Britain but has reestablished in northern Scotland following reintroduction on the Isle of Mull. It would have been unlikely to reach southern England naturally any time soon.
Unlike for golden eagles, there’s plenty of habitat for this lowland sea eagle on the south coast, where it feeds on seabirds and fish around coastal waters and estuaries. Pairs have already bred in Dorset and Sussex.
It’s the grouse shooting, stupid!
Given that golden eagles would be capable of naturally recolonising northern England, and given government is genuinely committed to facilitating their recovery, there’s a more important intervention it could make than reintroductions: a ban on driven grouse shooting. This industry is likely the most significant threat to golden eagles in Britain, with a Scottish study estimating that illegal killing in the vicinity of grouse moors accounted for up to 74 per cent of mortality of satellite tagged juveniles.
Grouse moors represent a dominant land use in the English uplands, overlapping heavily with the PRZs identified for eagles. Most of this is driven grouse shooting, in which intensive management creates artificially high densities of red grouse, which are driven by beaters towards a waiting line of clients with guns.
Maintaining such densities of red grouse necessitates the routine legal killing of predators like foxes, mustelids and corvids, as well as the illegal killing of raptors. Driven grouse moor management correlates geographically with confirmed persecution incidents of goshawks and peregrine falcons in the Peak District, and accounts for around 75 per cent of mortality in British hen harriers aged from 1-2 years, keeping populations of this red listed bird dangerously low.
This is the context into which the Labour government is offering to reintroduce golden eagles. The plan wouldn’t necessarily fail, but it would be an uphill struggle if 30 per cent of the reintroduced birds were mysteriously disappearing near grouse moors.
Perhaps the main reason the Labour government is proposing this, having so far treated nature with absolute disdain, is to attempt to win back some of the voters that it has sent stampeding towards the Green Party, in such a way that it can conveniently avoid a direct confrontation with the shooting estates.
When it comes to species that can’t recolonise Britain naturally and which therefore actually require reintroductions – such as lynx, elk or wild Tauros cattle – Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds has reportedly been less enthusiastic. All that golden eagles need to flourish in England is the removal of their main threat, driven grouse shooting – rather than £1m spent on re-introduction.
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