Predator or prey? The confounding case of the missing sea eagle

The missing white-tailed sea eagle. Photograph: Ian Griffin View image in fullscreen The missing white-tailed sea eagle. Photograph: Ian Griffin Predator or prey? The confounding case of the missing sea eagle The UK’s biggest bird of prey has been compared to a flying barn door. So how can one fitted with a satellite tracker disappear in prime grouse-shooting country? The six police officers arrived at the Snilesworth estate in two pickup trucks last week, according to one account. They asked to go up on the moors, a source said, and “so off they went”. A vast expanse of spectacularly undulating lands on the western edge of the North York Moors, Snilesworth is globally renowned for its grouse, partridge and pheasant shooting. It is known locally for attracting “rich people from London in helicopters and blacked-out SUVs”. This time, though, it was another rarified flying visitor that had drawn the police’s interest: the North York Moors are at the centre of a mystery surrounding a missing bird of prey. The officers, representing the national wildlife crime unit and North Yorkshire police, were seeking clues to the whereabouts of a white-tailed eagle, also known as a sea eagle, and more colloquially called the ‘flying barn door’, due to a 2.5-metre wingspan that makes them the UK’s largest raptor. Little appears to have been found in the copse that is said to have been the focus of the officers’ attentions. But enough apparently worried them about the circumstances surrounding the bird’s disappearance for North Yorkshire police to issue a call for information from the public on Monday. “The eagle’s disappearance is being treated as suspicious,” their press release said, “and an investigation is underway”. This was a more significant matter than your average avian disappearance. Since 2019, the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation (RDWF) and Forestry England have been seeking to reintroduce white-tailed eagles to the south coast . Once widespread across the UK, human persecution caused their extinction in England , with the last pair breeding there in 1780. View image in fullscreen The Snilesworth estate in the North York Moors is famed for its game bird shooting. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian To date, 45 young white-tailed eagles have been released from the project’s base on the Isle of Wight. In 2025, two of the birds bred in Dorset – something not seen in that county for 240 years. It is the resulting chick – satellite-tagged since birth and now fully grown – that has now disappeared. The cause of the disappearance is unknown. But one possibility aligns with what the RSPB says is a largely unchallenged scandal: the routine shooting, trapping or poisoning of birds of prey in the UK. The proximity of the eagle’s last known location to a number of large grouse shooting estates has not gone unnoticed. Between 2015 and 2024, 921 confirmed incidents of raptor persecution were recorded, of which at least 55% occurred on or near land managed for game