"I thought it were a pheasant…."

Poor bird.

A subsequent post-mortem by pathologists at the Regional Veterinary Laboratory at Knockalisheen, Limerick, showed the young eagle had been shot, the body holding some 45–50 shotgun pellets.

http://www.birdguides.com/webzine/article.asp?a=4260

Wednesday night ends on a sad note for me.

Reading this sort of stuff really pisses me off, whoever shot the bird should be screwed to the ground & have barbed wire shoved up his/her jacksie then pulled out again.

Sadly, there are those who think that all raptors should be culled, to save all the songbirds, the little fluffy animals, kittens, puppies, and small children.
Then there are the landowners who charge wealthy ****wits a small fortune to blow a few birds out of the sky to reinforce their masculinity and boost their inadequate sex drives.
They encourage their gamekeepers to keep down the predators that kill a few pheasants or grouse a year, because that really cuts into the overheads, I mean, there are something like eighteen million pheasants bred each year specifically to be shot, so a couple of hundred lost to raptors could really drive a business over the edge…
For every raptor killed, the landowner should be fined fifty thousand pounds, and the gamekeeper for that area fined several thousand pounds, and their gun licence taken away.

that’s appalling :(