A SPECIAL event is to be held in Skye next week to highlight the supposed new conciliatory approach being adopted by conservationists and sheep farmers when it comes to sea eagle management.

Entitled 'Crofting and Farming in the New Era of Sea Eagles', the event is being organised by the Farm Advisory Service and SAC Consulting and will be held at West Highland College UHI, Portree, on Tuesday evening.

However, John Willie Gillies, a crofter on the Isle of Raasay, said that while the conservation organisations now accept that sea eagles do take new-born lambs, they still don’t fully understand the consequences to hill farmers.

“We have one hirsel where we are losing lambs every year,” he said. “There is one area of the hill that because it’s beside a road and there’s a house there, the sea eagles don’t really go there. But on the open hill we’re losing a lot of lambs.

“When we go to keep our female lambs most of them now are from the one area – where the sea eagles tend not to go. So the balance of our stock has gone – there’s not enough from the open hill and too many from close in.

“The people involved in SNH don’t understand the management of a hill flock. They’ve not been brought up to understand how sheep work and how to manage them and the thing that I can see is that the sheep will just disappear from the hill.”

The Portree meeting will discuss the results of trials from various sea eagle monitor farms throughout Scotland, the requirements for applying for this year’s compensation scheme and information on sea eagle behaviour and ecology, with guest speakers from SNH and RSPB. It was fully booked some time ago, reflecting the issue’s importance to the hill sheep farming sector on the west coast.