SIR, – It may just have been coincidence that two separate articles about sea eagles and golden eagles appeared on the same page in last week’s issue of The Scottish Farmer.

These articles do, however, highlight the attention which is now being focused on raptors (not always for the right reasons).

It must be deeply worrying for farmers in the Highlands and Islands to experience increasing losses of their lambs to the burgeoning population of sea eagles and find that there is nothing they can do to combat these losses.

On our farm in the central Borders, we see most kinds of raptors, especially buzzards and sparrowhawks, but we are probably too far from the sea to attract sea eagles.

For too long, conservation bodies have been obsessed with raptors, which eye-catching though they may be, are so numerous that they are contributing in no small measure to the decline of many farmland birds, especially curlews, lapwings and oyster catchers, not to mention songbirds.

Modern farming methods and habitat loss tend to be blamed, unjustifiably, for these losses, but at the same time the number of predators has soared, from a list of crows, jays, magpies, grey squirrels, badgers, foxes, as well as raptors. All of these contribute to the increasing decline in farmland birds and songbirds. This rate of attrition is unsustainable.

While politicians and conservation bodies may find it hard to face up to this unpalatable truth, farmers in the Highlands and Islands will continue to suffer losses and furthermore the countryside will soon be bereft of some of its most iconic birds if we, and they, continue to do nothing about it.

Colin Strang Steel

Trustee,

SongBird Survival