It was easy to describe what I wanted to do with the eagles, but actually getting it all laid out is an entirely different story. I had to wait twenty days until the snow thawed before I could climb high enough on the mountain to find the old eagle nests. It's been a significant amount of time now since we've had any eagles on the island, so the few nests that existed were very derelict. However, there was enough similarity between the few sites that I found that I could at least piece together an idea of where the eagles prefer to build and what their nests look like.

I was surprised that all the nests were above the snowline, and after another twenty days of exploring to find the few neglected nests, I returned to the city to ask Shasta about how the eagles handle snow. Our eagle stayed through winters and its nest was above the snow line. Apparently, they do a good job of keeping their nest clear of snow, despite it being a nest built on the ground. There have been a few incidents where strong, long lasting blizzards resulted in some eagles freezing to death in the highest nests, but those situations are rare on the mainland, and practically unheard of on our island.

As for location, the eagles like to find ledged areas that overlook a cliff that is at least a hundred feet tall, and then build their nest back from the cliff a little ways. Their nests consist of both tree trunks and larger branches, resulting in something that looks reminiscent of a beaver dam rather than a nest. They also seem to break the trees between their nest and the cliff, as there were shattered tree stumps leading the way to the cliffs.

Which means building out nest areas for the eagles is going to be a real pain. The areas are exceptionally remote and by their nature difficult to travel to. That makes the idea of hauling one of these giant eagles while keeping it unconscious all the more difficult. Further, getting all of this, a diethyl ether facility, and the bathhouse area ready in the next two years before the crystal is done is all really stacking up to be a difficult endeavor.

However, I think that with clever use of the population, we can make something work. I'd already expanded the workforce that was in charge of making trails, collecting downed tree limbs, and building rock dams. I think that we can probably quadruple that workforce, and have the existing demons train the new ones with this new directive. Then, after a year or so, split them into two departments, ones in charge of managing the new eagle areas, and the original workforce in charge of managing our forests and valleys.

Since the existing forest management group is more familiar with the general terrain of our island, it should be easy to describe the sort of areas we want to build artificial nesting grounds at. I'll try to convince Zaka to lend a few of our strongest military soldiers to assist occasionally with downing the trees and building the nests. Since the locations are somewhat remote, it'd be best if the the nests can be built quickly, so having incredibly strong individuals who can break down a tree in a single blow, and help move it to the nesting location will speed things up drastically.

I expect I'll probably need to spend a bit over a month or so to get all this set up, but then I should be able to move my attention to building out the necessary facilities to make diethyl ether.

It was easy to put an application out for the workers I wanted at city hall, the issue was that the sheer number I requested was very high, and there is a lot of conflicting and confusing information floating around the city related to the eagles. Most of our population now has never seen an eagle. A very small portion remembers the initial eagle fights we had, a larger portion remember our singular eagle that we kept around for a number of years, and most have heard stories from both of those factions and folk tales from the dwarves about the eagles.

In other words, to most of the population, the eagles are an enigma, seen more as a force of nature rather than an animal that can be tamed. So getting new employees willing to work on exactly that problem was difficult. It ended up taking just under two months to actually get the workforce filled out. For the first few weeks, I worked with the existing forest management demons to show them what I had planned. They actually had better insight than I did on nesting locations and what seemed to be the eagle's patterns and nest shape.

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The ground birds also build nests on the ground, and most of the forest management goblins have a quite deep, if instinctual, understanding of nature. The majority of my time working with them was mostly spent on describing how I planned on managing the eagles long term, and relaying the info I'd learned from Shasta.

Apparently, I'm not the first to do re-nesting on the island. The forest management goblins have been re-nesting ground birds for a while. The ground birds apparently like building their nests on shallow sloped areas, but they get confused when small pools form near rock dams, and build their nests near by, despite the slope being higher than normal. While the forest management goblins occasionally just hunt some of the ground birds that do this, they've also started relocating nests to more appropriate areas.

What they found is that the best way to do it is to fully relocate the entire nest, and the bird will just recognize it's own nest again, and as long as the area is somewhat appropriate for it, it'll stay there instead. Obviously, the eagle nests are too big to manage that way, but they suspect that bringing along the down feathers from the eagle will probably work, and that they'll experiment with some ground birds to see how effective it is.

Since I was clearly out of my depth when it came to these subjects, I left it to them to do most of the project planning. I wasn't quite ready myself to go off to work on the first stages of my next project, so I worked with Zeb, Shasta, and a couple of the forest managers to determine the best place to set up the eagle feeding area. According to Shasta, each mountain around the dwarven capitol has it's own feeding station, so we probably only need one.

They have dozens of large carved bowls for the eagles, along a slope, and fill the bowls in descending order. Apparently, they've built a stone building alongside the bowls so that the dwarves carrying the food aren't able to be easily attacked by the eagles, with the bowls being partially covered by the building. For solo eagles along the coast, a simple offering pad sufficed which is what we used previously, With so many eagles in one place though, things can get a little more dangerous, especially during mating season, so you want to keep the food hidden until it's time to eat.

Basically, we'll need a whole facility for storing the food that the eagles can't break into, and then a path for us to put the food in the bowls without the eagles being able to attack whoever is in charge of feeding. Ultimately, the location we settled upon is in the other valley. We'll build a new road up the mountain off the existing road, and build the facility there. I asked Shasta how many eagles live on any particular mountain around the capitol, and she said anywhere from five to fifty, it just depends on the size of the mountain and it's proximity to the city. In other words, we'll want to prepare for even more than fifty, just in case. It's an astronomical amount of food, since the eagles tend to eat about ten times as much as the average demon, though I suppose if we have that many eagles on our island, it's basically a way of converting our excess food into powerful, albeit unreliable, military defense.

I'd gathered everything I needed to begin my next construction project shortly after we'd finally filled out the workforce for building artificial eagle nests. I had copper tubing made, along with plenty of copper cable and other components. What I'll be attempting to redevelop is the Birkland-Eyde process, which is a method of using electric arcs to generate nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. From that, you can then produce nitric acid, but you can also use the nitrogen dioxide as a catalyst in the lead chamber process to produce sulfuric acid. It isn't very energy efficient, but it doesn't require any rare catalysts, so it should be a little more straightforward to build.

If I can get it working, and we can produce both nitric acid and sulfuric acid, the sulfuric acid can be used as a reactant with ethanol, and that should let us produce ether readily. As an added bonus, we could also produce ammonium nitrate using the ammonia and nitric acid, which would also open up nitrous oxide as a better anesthetic to use. The ether will be useful to initially knock an eagle out, but nitrous oxide will be safer to use for the actual transport process. Even if this fails to be useful on the eagles, I wanted to produce both nitric acid and sulfuric acid, so this project is a definite win if I can get it working.

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