“sailing with supreme dominion
Thro’ the azure deep of air.”
The largest eagle we have in Great Britain is the erne or white-tailed eagle—the sea-eagle. Not that it fishes for its food; indeed, it seldom eats fish unless it happens to rob another bird. But it levies toll upon the sea-birds themselves, harrying the guillemot and puffin, and making them its prey. By preference it builds upon the loftiest crags on the stormiest shores, but if it can find rocks inland that are rugged enough, and that overlook some stretch of water where the wild-fowl come, it will build its eyrie there, and scourge the surrounding country (not sparing the sheepfolds), to supply its young.
They are not uncommon in the wildest parts of Scotland and Ireland, and though, of course, persecuted everywhere, they succeed by their extraordinary wariness and admirable judgment as to breeding-places in keeping their ground. For the erne has the expert eye of an engineer for an “inaccessible” spot, and having found one that nothing that moves on feet can reach, it returns to it year after year, and brings out its young in security. All that our poets have written of their eagles of fancy may, for majesty in flight, be fairly applied to this bird. “When the tempest’s at its loudest, on the gale the eagle rides,”—“playmate of the storm,”—“triumphant on the bosom of the storm, glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form,”—“a swift eagle, in the morning glare, breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight,”—all these are quite applicable to the sea-eagle, for folk say that no tempest that ever blew could keep the erne at home. When the sea-birds are driven inland, the ernes remain to wheel about as if enraptured in the storm-distracted sky—and “like spirits hardened by despair, joy in the savage tempest.”
There is nothing mean about it. A law to itself, and therefore lawless; stronger than any other fowl it ever sees, and therefore a tyrant; a bird of prey, and therefore pitiless. Its eyrie is a citadel that cannot be stormed, and the fierce-eyed robber, seated on its eminence, overlooks the townships of the gulls, and as it pleases takes manorial tithe of the fish plunder they bring up from the sea, and of their young,