Golden eagle

Lyly, M.S., Villers, A., Koivisto, E., Helle, P., Ollila, T. et Korpimäki, E. (2015). Avian top predator and the landscape of fear: responses of mammalian mesopredators to risk imposed by the golden eagle. Ecology and Evolution, 5(2), 503–514.

A study combining 23 years of Finnish monitoring of eagle nests and mesopredator presence indices. The authors attribute this unexpected result to shared habitat preference between the eagle and the fox rather than a failure of predation: the fox, larger than a pine marten, likely evades direct predation more easily and benefits from the same open habitats as the eagle. The pine marten, by contrast, follows a non-linear pattern — more abundant at low to intermediate eagle densities, but declining at the highest densities.

Lyly, M.S., Villers, A., Koivisto, E., Helle, P., Ollila, T. et Korpimäki, E. (2016). Guardian or threat: does golden eagle predation risk have cascading effects on forest grouse? Oecologia, 182, 487–498.

The same Finnish study system as above, extended to both grouse species. The article's title — 'guardian or threat' — sums up the conclusion: the golden eagle plays both roles at once depending on the prey's age class, making it impossible to summarize its net effect in a single word.

Jackson, C.R., Rød-Eriksen, L., Mattisson, J. et al. (2023). Predation of endangered Arctic foxes by Golden eagles: What do we know? Ecology and Evolution, 13(3), e9864.

The program's foxes live in large outdoor enclosures located in their natural habitat, which makes predation by a raptor capable of bypassing an open enclosure a mortality factor that is hard to eliminate without compromising the program's very goal (preparing the foxes for life in the wild). See the Arctic fox profile for the regional decline of this population in Fennoscandia.