My conversation with Karsh was relatively short. Him and his family have lived here for about two decades, and while he has some memories of the eagles being somewhat territorial with each other at certain times of year, he doesn't have many details on the specifics of what that looks like. Shasta, on the other hand, had multiple insights that were actually very helpful as to what we should expect.

The eagles living along the coast are pretty territorial, and usually only allow their mate onto their mountain or in the air in the surrounding valleys. During mating season they'll pair bond, and stay bonded until their juveniles leave their territory, at which point the male usually also leaves the area.

If that was the only info we'd gotten, it'd seem like my concerns would have been assuaged when it comes to setting up an exceptionally large crystal here. However, she went on to describe how the eagles in the mountains surrounding the dwarven capitol, with Par-Tor as a feature, behave differently. Those mountains each have over a dozen eagles nesting at different altitudes. The capitol has offering grounds to the eagles set up at the base of each mountain. When the offerings are placed, the eagle that lives highest on the mountain eats first, and then each eagle eats in descending order based on the altitude their nest is built at.

In other words, with an abundance of food and mana, the eagles become less territorial, and we will have to come up with a good way to handle many eagles showing up on our mountain again all at once. To further complicate matters, when the eagles near the capitol enter the breeding season, even just going to bring food to them becomes a somewhat dangerous task, and travelling up any of the mountains where they nest becomes extremely dangerous.

I had Shasta give a rough estimate for where the feeding point would normally be constructed, and above which height they nest at. The results were not good. While we don't need to go up our mountain proper that often, the level where a feeding area would normally be built at is already below the level where one of our villages is built, and our road around the outside of the island goes above that height for a while. The nests would be generally found above those levels, but could easily also be found along the ridges descending beside the valleys, including some of the areas that we've terraced.

The dwarves, who farm their lowlands and have been digging tunnels and mines through their mountains for millennia have learned to coexist with the eagles. There is a non-zero chance that part of the reason they're as underground focused as they are is because of the threat from the skies that the eagles posed to early groups of dwarves on the continent.

Losing access to that much of our land is unacceptable for us though. We could maybe learn to live without having access to the least useful of our land, high up on the mountain. Giving up a large amount of our island, including developed portions, however is something we can't really afford to do. The eagles represent a very unique problem to us, as a result.

We can't simply ignore feeding them to drive them away, as they'll immediately just begin feeding on our citizenry. Unfortunately, they're also too intelligent and powerful to simply drive away by annoying them using something like irritants. They'd either learn to hate whatever creature brought the irritant to them, or they'd destroy whatever system we used to deliver the irritant to them over a distance.

By the same measure, they're too large and powerful to corral into some kind of bird sanctuary where we could keep them isolated. If that would work, we'd just keep them on a different island and that would be the end of it. That, or we'd forcibly relocate them to the highest point on our mountain, and just make them live in whatever situation that causes amongst themselves.

I voiced my concerns with Shasta on the matter. If it was just us demons, I'd simply use large artillery pieces to put the birds down at a safe distance, and that would be the end of it. However, the dwarven worship of the eagles makes the topic far more complicated. Killing a dozen or more of them would basically put an end to any future dwarven relations. Just the fact that dozens of eagles would potentially fly out to sea never to be seen again would be too suspicious for the dwarves to accept.

Giving up a large amount of our land is also unacceptable. Likewise, we know just how much more productive we become while having a large mana crystal available. Our crops grow better, our people are more robust, and construction happens at a breakneck pace. So simply giving up on that idea is a no-go.

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There is one very low probability option that would leave everyone happy, though it would be dangerous as well. After I thought of the idea, I asked Shasta some more questions before I was willing to even utter it out loud. I asked about how often eagles around the capitol re-nest, and if there were any other unique properties they displayed while nesting.

The eagles, it seems, have to spend a lot of effort building nests. As such, it's rare for them to ever actually abandon a nest. Along the coast and around the capitol, it's common for eagles that lose out in a contest of strength to give their nest up to the winner. The loser either settles for the old nest, uses one of the dozen other abandoned nests, or builds a new one. In the rare years where they have extreme rain, whole trees will frequently flow down the mountainsides as old neglected nests wash away.

So, I then voiced my plan to Shasta. We'll build a few dozen nests around the upper most parts of the mountain, and maintain decent trails up to each nest area. We'll look over what is left of our own old and abandoned eagle nests, alongside any information any of the dwarves might have, and try to make the areas enticing, while also reinforcing them to help keep our higher rainfall from destroying unoccupied nests.

While our feeding area will be higher up the mountain, there are still multiple concerns related to the eagles arriving. What if they don't choose our nests? What if they start harassing our citizens? The reason we want paths to all the nests is a hint to that. I've been thinking about making diethyl ether for a while now. It's a fairly useful substance for various reactions. An interesting property of diethyl ether is that it was used as an early anesthetic. It's not that powerful of an anesthetic though, so actually successfully drugging them will probably be a fight in itself.

If we can manage to drug the eagles that cause problems by nesting in the wrong areas, we can clip the feathers in their wings, and relocate them to the nests we want them in while they're unconscious. For a while after clipping they'll be unable to fly, and we'll need to bring them food to their nesting area. The hope would be that in the time where they are recovering from having their wings clipped, they'll become more dependent on their caretakers, and become more compliant with living where we tell them to.

Shasta seemed very impressed with the solution I'd devised. However, I was quick to warn her that it wasn't actually a solution, just a plan that could easily fall through. If we can't drug the eagles for some reason, or they refuse to use our nests, or become violent after drugging, or any number of other problems, then we will need to put them down. I told her that, in my estimation, the most likely outcome is that less than 20% of the eagles end up behaving in an acceptable manner, and within a year, the other ones will be dead.

If I lied now and simply said it will all work out, then when the time comes to do what needs done, we could face far more backlash. I did give another silver lining though. In all likelihood, any new eagles that are raised on the island will be far more compliant, and they'll be used to having us around, and we can curb their behavior from a young age. So after the all-too-likely initial purge, most of the eagles should be fine from then on.

After that portion of discussion ended on a bit of a somber note, I asked Shasta to join me in talking with Zeb about planning out the grand bathhouse where our crystal will be situated. The discussion was mostly about aesthetics and scale, with very little need for actual detailed design of the pools. For the most part, we already have the necessary components figured out.

The main purpose of bringing Shasta along for this discussion was to lighten her mood, and remind her of one upside of the tradeoff that was likely to result in a few eagle deaths at a minimum. Though when I phrase it like that myself, it almost seems petty. The actual main upside is multiplying our available mana that can be used by our citizenry and machinery. We've used small mana crystals in the caves paired with zinc fluorite to make rechargeable flashlights, and when we briefly installed the 8-foot crystal in the old bathhouse to let the majority of the dwarves return home, some of the ovens nearby to the bathhouse became unusably hot.

Following that logic, I imagine that such a large crystal will probably increase the general mana in the area to a level where we'll need to rebalance all the ovens in the city, and might need to revisit some of our closer mechanical installations to make sure they aren't overheating due to excess mana. However, that also means that we'll have increased industrial potential around the city, which is something I've been somewhat desperate for. I've thus far had to be quite careful about overusing local mana to not starve the area of what mana it has, meaning most of our workers have long commutes to industrial areas. This could potentially allow us to set up something like a textile manufacturing area or similar mechanical factory producing citizen grade goods near to the city.

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