Posted online: Mar 4th, 2010

A 10-MONTH-OLD male Golden Eagle chick that was born and reared in a Donegal eyrie has been found poisoned on the Sligo/Leitrim border at Truskmore Mountain.
Conall, named after the Irish translation of Donegal, was found using the GPS satellite transmitter attached to his back. The Golden Eagle Trust had used GPS to allow local people to follow his movements on their website. A post mortem revealed he was in perfect health prior to the poisoning. It is the second poisoning incident in the space of a year.
“This issue is about the illegal use of poison within Irish farming,” said Lorcán O’Toole from the Golden Eagle Trust.
“We believe the few hundred farmers using poison illegally are at variance with the huge environmental advances Irish farming has undergone over the last ten years. We have always fully acknowledged the support and co-operation of the sheep farming community in the Northwest and continue to do so. But unfortunately the poisoning of this Golden Eagle undermines the image of Irish food and weakens the potential for local tourism and damages the fragile rural economy in the Northwest, we believe.”
“Farmers in Donegal bear witness to the fact that eagles can readily co-exist with sheep farming. We believe that ordinary people across Ireland expect Irish Agriculture to co-exist with Nature. Is our green nation so timid, so tame and so weak that we cannot tolerate several pairs of Wild Golden Eagles?
The group believes that illegal poisoning could threaten the project’s future.
“If Golden Eagles become extinct in Ireland for the second time in little over a century, then this small charity can only but apologise for imagining that free-flying Eagles, in this new Millennium, would encounter a society that broadly re-embraced the ancient Gaelic respect for wild creatures.”