Eagle folklore: Implications for species’ conservation and extinction
Posted on Thursday 4 December 2025
Ireland was formerly home to two species of eagles: both the Golden Eagle (Iolar Fíréan) and the White Tailed Eagles (Iolar Mara), but both had become extinct by the early twentieth century due to human persecution.
The early twentieth century also saw the foundation of An Cumann Le Béaloideas Éireann, The Folklore of Ireland Society in 1927. Their mission, as made manifest in their motto: Colligite quae superaverunt fragmenta, ne pereant (‘collect the remnants, lest they perish’) was to save the folklore of Ireland, in particular of the Gaelic-speaking West, which was considered threatened with eradication due to the combined forces of modernity, language loss, and population decline following the Great Famine of the nineteenth century. A few years later in 1935 the Irish Folklore Commission (An Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann) was established which set out to systematically collect Ireland’s folklore through the employment of professional full-time folklore collectors. The fruits of their labours now make up a substantial part of Ireland’s National Folklore Collection.
One of the roles of an archive is to preserve: to conserve cultural forms considered to be of national and historical importance for posterity, which may otherwise be lost. My research seeks to ask what can the archive - whose goal was to preserve cultural traditions including those related to natural species - tell us about popular perceptions and traditions of extinct species? And furthermore, are there any important lessons we may glean therein of relevance to the contemporary era of the Anthropocene and the current ecological extinctions we are threatened with, termed the sixth mass extinction event by some scientists?
To this end, I will be consulting records of traditional stories about eagles in the National Folklore Collection (including folktales, and legends of infant and livestock abduction), proverbs, accounts of nest-raiding, eagle- and egg-hunting, and placename lore.
An t-Iolar agus an Leanbh (‘The Eagle and the Child’): Legend of an infant abducted by an eagle and the subsequent rescue mission which follows. Source: National Folklore Collection Schools’ Collection Volume 1037 Page 282. Collected by Róise Ní Chíonaoith of Meenacahan National School, Co. Donegal as part of The Schools’ Collection scheme (1937-38).
The story of Ireland’s eagles doesn’t end with extinction however. The early twenty-first century saw the reintroduction of Golden Eagles in Glenveagh National Park in Donegal, and White-Tailed Eagles in Killarney National Park, County Kerry. The reintroduction of eagles to Ireland provides an exciting opportunity for fieldwork to ascertain the contemporary popular perceptions of these birds, and how this is affecting the success of re-establishing an eagle population in Ireland today.