A History of Sutherland's Birds

This little booklet, borrowed from the Golspie Heritage Society, contains a paper from the Journal of the Scottish Ornithologist's Club written by Ian Pennie in 1962.

Pennie was Golspie's doctor, living and practising in an imposing house at the northern end of Main Street. He was obviously an old-style country practitioner, much respected by his patients, all of whom were well aware that they were of secondary importance to the good doctor: his main interest was the birds of Sutherland.

His paper is entitled 'A Century of Bird Watching in Sutherland', not because he lived long enough to watch birds for a hundred years but that a proper scientific record of the region's bird life only extended back a century. Prior to that, the records were vague, but the good doctor did unearth one account which dated back to the 17th century, written by Robert Gordon in 1630. This pre-dated the final removal of the last of the great Caledonian pine forests from the area, and gave a taste of the bird life which existed before man altered this environment beyond recognition.

"In this forest," Robert Gordon wrote, "and in all this province, there is a great store of...." A great store - one can only imagine what this meant, but one would love to have seen this area, which now boasts neither golden nor sea eagles, as he saw it.

As Dr Pennie goes on to explain, the eagles were another grim casualty of the coming of the sheep to Sutherland at the time of the clearances. As he describes it....

These great birds, and others, including the osprey, could barely withstand the slaughter. Relief only came in the 1870s and 1880s when sheep farming failed and large areas were turned over to deer forests and wildlife became more tolerated. However, from the middle of that century, Sutherland's birds faced a new foe, collectors, who went to any lengths to shoot specimens and take eggs.

A degree of recovery came with the 20th century but by that time many species which had been common in Sutherland had disappeared from the region. The osprey was extinct in Scotland by1916 but by 1954 birds had begun to appear from Scandinavia and the first pair nested successfully in 1959.