THE WORD TRAVELS the grapevine in a life like mine. You establish your place in it slowly, over years. You feed in what you know, it feeds you in return. It is a careful, watchful process. If the word reaches the wrong ears, the consequences can be disastrous. Eagles might die. A whole landscape might fail. How you use the grapevine and its information is your business. If you misuse it, expect the grapevine to bypass you in the future and forever. Expect that at the very least.
Sometimes the information it offers you is inconsequential, clouds across the moon, but very occasionally it stops you in your tracks, and having stopped, you sense the intimation of a new thing beyond which all is changed. And I have heard about three young eagles roosting together in the hills above Loch Tay, and I have stopped in my tracks to consider the implications. And what I think is this: a new thoroughfare of nature stretching clear across the waist of the country has begun to build, and it is being built by eagles. It is the result of the decision to follow the white-tailed eagle reintroduction project on Rum (1975–85 and 1993–98) with a new phase (2007–2012) near the Tay estuary on the east coast, and the birds’ various responses to their new surroundings.
So one day I heard about the three young eagles roosting in the hills above Loch Tay and I had questions for the grapevine.
“Eagles? Plural?”
I have watched many golden eagles in Highland Scotland over more than thirty years now. Young golden eagles travel widely especially in their first year, but they wander alone. Even siblings from the same eyrie leave the parent birds’ territory separately and travel separately. As a rule they do not roost communally. They do not pluralise. At least not here. In North America they embark on long north-south migrations and flocks of golden eagles do occur. I can hardly imagine what that must look like. But three eagles in the same stand of trees on a hill above Loch Tay had to be something… other. The grapevine answered:
“Not golden eagles. Sea eagles.”
“Sea eagles? Loch Tay?”
Loch Tay is heartland, the centre of the centre. There are few more utterly land-locked large lochs grasped in a fastness of mountains anywhere in the land. If you were to draw a line on a map of Scotland across its 130-mile-wide girth from the eastmost thrust of the Tay estuary to Mull in the west, it would bisect Loch Tay at the furthest distance from the sea in either direction; so on the face of it, a strange place for sea eagles.
The morning was early, quiet and still. A half-hearted track took the steepening hillside head-on, no bends to ease the gradient. I am a slow starter on the hill. I like the chance to lubricate away the muscle-rust on easier slopes, I grow stronger with the morning. Also, steep ground encourages a head-down approach and mine is essentially a head-up, horizon-scanning gait. So I put images in my head of sea eagles I have known so that my eyes could watch the path. Remember the first time?
Mingulay, the Outer Hebrides, a few links in that island chain south of Barra, a warm late-May mist burned away over five days into a swimming-in-the-ocean early June heatwave, and I had gone for a long walk round Mingulay’s hills. I considered an odd-looking rock two hundred yards away. It was as simple as that. One rock among thousands of rocks caught my eye because there was something not right about it. The nature writer behind that eye wanted to know why.
The rock had an embellishment on top, no less grey and unprepossessing than the rock itself, but it was somehow grey in a way that the rock was not, a different texture of grey, a ruffled grey, and browner than the grey of the rock, almost a pale tawny grey. It was as shapeless as the rock itself, but the surface of its shapelessness stirred a little in the breeze in a way that the surface of rock should not stir. It was also awkwardly poised on a top edge of the rock in a way that suggested it might topple at any moment. The rock was squat and rounded, about six feet high and at least as wide. The embellishment was about three feet high and half as wide. At first glance it looked perched and hunched, but at second glance I was thinking it was just another piece of rock and I had been deluded by a trick of the light. So I put down my pack, sat on it, raised the binoculars, and what slid into focus was the turned back of a huge, grey, perched, headless bird. I had simply never seen such a thing, never seen anything so distressingly headless, never seen anything so massively dishevelled (it had chaotically protruding feathers the size of paddles). I still thought it might topple over.
What changed everything was the screaming arrival of a pair of Arctic terns. Their low, fast, line-astern attack was aimed at where the headless bird’s head should have been, and was impressive enough to induce it to duck, but when the creature straightened again it was quite a bit taller and it had a considerable neck, and a head. Then it turned to follow the flight of the terns and revealed an embellishment of its own, a hooked beak like a machete. I had seen many golden eagles before, including one unusually large female at unusually close quarters when we surprised each other, and that male that stood briefly on the end of my outstretched, heavily gloved arm; but this, I told myself, was not one of these. There was only one thing it could be.
I knew a fair bit about the sea eagle reintroduction project based on Rum, but I had never crossed the path of any of the fruits of its labours. So although I had read the book and seen the film and admired the photographs, none of that had readied me for the sheer monstrousness of this creature in my binoculars.
Twice more the terns attacked, twice more the eagle avoided a direct hit by dipping its head. But such was the disparity in the size of the birds and of the weapons at their disposal that I wondered frivolously if the terns were on a suicide mission. Then the eagle flew. It flew by deploying something like a half-opened parachute that immediately cloaked the entire rock in deep shadow, such an apparently uncoordinated acreage of wingspan that it looked as if chaos must result: the thing would topple over. Yet in the next moment it was clear the colossus was airborne and moving low across the hillside to a graceless, wing-heaving rhythm. A golden eagle flies from such a rock by stepping off and holding its wings wide and still, finding lift and grace at once. It is, I had assumed until that moment, how all eagles behave; it is, I was convinced before that moment, what makes eagles so admirable, the sheer control of every aspect of flight, so that nothing at all is beyond them, and no manoeuvre is conducted with anything other than fluency and style and, yes, grace. And then there was this… this upheaval of a bird, this massive apology for an eagle with all the grace of an airborne tank. But then I noticed something familiar, something I knew from all those years of watching golden eagles, something wonderfully exclusive to the tribe of eagles. As the sea eagle flew low above the surface of the land it was pursued across the island by the ominous black sprawl of its shadow that rippled over rocks, all those other rocks that simply amounted to the lie of the land, until my nature writer’s eye had stumbled over the one that didn’t look right. Watching the eagle devour distance, I saw how every rock it passed was darkly transformed as the touch of that improbable shadow crossed it and moved on. I thought: this is an eagle alright. Then I thought: and this is a bird that can make a difference. That was the first time, the first of all my sea eagles.
I paused for breath above Loch Tay, looked up and saw distant trees. Up there? Head down again. Remember the second time?
The Isle of Mull, autumn, three years after Mingulay. I considered an odd-looking tree two hundred yards away. It was as simple as that. One tree among hundreds caught my eye because there was something not right about it. It shifted uneasily in a big wind. I was driving slowly on one of Mull’s coast-hugging single-track roads. I had not seen a vehicle for some time and I was driving with a nature writer’s eyes rather than a motorist’s, watching for otters mostly (this because a few years earlier driving this same stretch of road, an otter had stepped from the ditch and trotted up the road ahead of the car and I had followed it in first gear for about a hundred yards before it took to the rocks of the shore). Then the road twisted among trees and there was that birch that shifted uneasily, then it spilled an eagle from the innards of its crown.
There was the same collapsing parachute aspect to the unfurling curve of wings that I had seen on Mingulay, the curious sense of a bird that looked too large for the details of the landscape. It drifted past the last tree and headed for the shore in a long glide.
The tide was far out, which on that particular corner of Mull means a wide expanse of mud was laid bare. The eagle landed, and went walking out across the mud. I wasn’t clear why, as it didn’t seem to be trying to feed there. When it stopped with its back turned and its giveaway beak out of sight, and with its raggedly disordered plumage and dark grey-brown colouring, it looked like a broken fence post. No golden eagle ever looked like that. There again, golden eagles don’t generally go walking in tidal mud, even Mull golden eagles. I was learning quickly that the sea eagle is something of a shape-shifter, and that it is also a lot less wary of the human race and all its artefacts than the golden eagle. After a few minutes of mud-wading the bird flew again, and again I thought that as with the Mingulay bird, the flight at low level looked heavy, disappointingly graceless. No golden eagle ever flew like that.
It had travelled no more than fifty yards when it dislodged a second eagle from the mud, one that I had simply not seen because it too had assumed the guise of a broken fence post in the mud until it revealed itself by flying. They flew off together, low and slow, heading for the distant sea. I crossed the bay to the muddy terrain where I had seen the first eagle land, and there I saw my first eagle footprints. There must be occasions when golden eagles leave footprints in shallow snow, although I have never come across them in all my years of walking golden eagle country, years of watching golden eagles. But it seemed to me that day that sea eagle footprints were about to become a commonplace feature of tidal landscapes. They are, of course, huge.
So those were my first two encounters with the sea eagle, more properly known as the European white-tailed eagle, Haliaeetus albicilla if you must, also known in antiquity as the erne. But “sea eagle” is the name that has stuck, although the bird is a prodigious traveller and can turn up almost anywhere there are tracts of open water. Like Loch Tay, for instance.
The hills around Loch Tay, Highland Perthshire, in the spring. I paused a few hundred yards away from a group of old Scots pines, not tall but broad-shouldered and stout-limbed. I was responding to an invitation from Polly Pullar, writer, photographer and friend, to come and look at these trees in the early morning, because they were being used as a roost by sea eagles. I leaned against a shadowed rock and focussed binoculars on them. Early sunlight cross-hatched the limbs and branches with deep black shadows, making a patchy chaos of the canopies. No roosting eagle could wish for better daylight camouflage. I let the glasses roam slowly, let my eyes accustom to the shapes and shadows within the trees, looked for the shapes and shadows that weren’t quite right, found none. I waited, I worked the glasses among the branches. It was still early. They could still be there, in which case, sooner or later they would fly, in which case they would stir, stretch their wings, shake the moisture from their plumage and reorder it, any or all of these things before they flew; or, as it happened, none of these things.
They came out, one by one, and minutes apart, without fuss or fanfare or any warning that I detected, and of course, they came out of the wrong side of the trees, the shaded side, the side away from the sun. Now why did I not think of that? But they drifted on the air and did not go far, and one perched on the hillside and preened in the sunlight, and two that had left five minutes apart and vanished west came back along the skyline wingtip to wingtip, and there were not three eagles, there were four. The fourth flew alone, and it was paler and smaller than the others and there was considerably less of the machete about its beak, and it flew more gracefully and with far fewer wingbeats, and the white under its wings and its tail confirmed the presence among the roosting young sea eagles of a roosting young golden eagle.
The thing about this part of the country is that it is half-way between the established sea eagle breeding territory of Mull and the relatively new east coast reintroduction project on the Tay estuary. All three places are on the same line of latitude. In the hills immediately north and south of the loch, and all the way to the west coast, the terrain is long-established golden eagle country. Sea eagles have been absent here for more than a hundred years. Had been absent…
The thought struck: pilgrims for nature, travelling the same line of latitude across the country but in opposite directions. They had all begun with no destination in mind. Another thought: was this the destination nature had in mind for them as they pursued some flightpath of inherited knowledge? In the new sea eagle strongholds of Mull and Skye, they frequently come into contact with golden eagles, sometimes hostile contact, but I had heard of nothing like this before.
All four roosting eagles were young birds, probably even first year birds. The golden eagle would lose the white underwing and tail patches in time and the sea eagles would gain the diagnostic white tail of their tribe. The sea eagles had come on this high roost above Loch Tay from the east where they had been released, and the golden eagle had most likely come from an established territory in the west from which it had been driven by its parents. The pale eaglet of a pale mother, I thought to myself. The territory of the pale eagle I know so well is a leisurely hour’s flight from here. Could this be…?
The young wanderers had found common cause in each other’s company; that was the next thought that struck. They wandered off about the day’s business. There was no sign of any collective purpose but I do think they spent it travelling within sight of each other for much of the time. They had been using the tree as a roost for several days already, and would do so for a few weeks before they vanished. There was, it seemed, some kind of security in this small assembly, and in the particular landscape where chance had overtaken them. We walked on through the morning, making a wide loop through the hills, hoping that they were not travelling far from their roost, and that our paths would cross again during the day. They did. As we sat on a hillside for a midday lunch break the golden eagle of the group appeared not fifty yards away and lingered briefly just above our skyline. Could it be that for as long as this unlikely group of eagles roosted together, the golden eagle was influenced in its behaviour by the unwariness of the sea eagles? As the afternoon unfolded, questions crowded round like midges on a damp August evening.
Was it possible that because the new east coast project is based more or less due east of a sea eagle stronghold that evolved over years following the reintroduction off the west coast, it had inadvertently created the conditions by which young wandering birds from both coasts might find each other by exploring the same line of latitude and its great lochs and rivers? And given that the western half of that line – the Highland half – passes through one golden eagle territory after another, many if not all of them established for hundreds if not thousands of years, is it also possible that the passage of sea eagles through golden eagle heartlands might lure young golden eagles east along the same route? And if so, is there a wedge of land 130 miles long and a few miles wide that is being adopted by the young of two different species of eagles as a kind of thoroughfare between strongholds? If such a speculative theory were ever to hold any water at all, sea eagles would have to be making coast-to-coast journeys, but how could the Tay estuary population of young birds acquire awareness of the existence of a sea eagle stronghold on Mull? That may seem like the most baffling question of all, yet I think I know the answer: I think they find each other because it is in the nature of sea eagles.
Consider this. The young birds are taken from eyries in Norway with two or three chicks, and when they are between one and two months old. All they have learned from their parents is how to eat and what flight looks like. They travel by plane and van to the release sites in Scotland where they are held until they are strong enough to fly free and fend for themselves. Young birds from the original reintroduction programme that began on Rum in 1975 routinely wandered up to sixty miles away but a few made it to Northern Ireland and some to Shetland. Fewer still, responding to who knows what kind of inherited knowledge, made it all the way back to Norway. In 2011, a bird released in Ireland was found injured and rescued from a sea cliff five hundred miles away on the north-east coast of Scotland. I imagine that it too was heading for Norway.
The distances involved may be surprising, but the awareness of ancestry and how to track its spoor across ancestral terrain should not be. All kinds of wildlife tribes possess it. The most celebrated are humpback whales, which can travel from one ocean to another to find their own kind. I have seen more modest examples of it myself. When I was writing the first of my books about swans, Waters of the Wild Swan (Jonathan Cape, 1992), I talked to the staff of a swan hospital in Surrey where, at any one time, they may have up to two hundred swan “patients” recuperating on hospital ponds from illness or injury. They took one group of six fully recovered swans forty miles by road to release them on a reservoir. Their return journey was slow because of heavy traffic, and when they reached the hospital again they found the six swans had beaten them “home”. They had flown forty miles across densely built-up terrain with no recognisable landmarks, and knew with absolute certainty how to reach their destination. And a badger sett I know in the hills of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park was “cold” for thirty years after the residents had been gassed. Then quite suddenly badgers returned several generations later. Nothing and no one took them there. But they followed the ancestral spoor. When I asked an older and much more experienced badger-watcher how he accounted for it, he shrugged and said: “Once a badger sett, always a badger sett,” as if that explained everything.
And actually, it might. The fact that there was no sustained sea eagle presence in Scotland between 1918, when the last one was shot in Shetland, and 1975 when the first Norwegian chicks arrived on Rum, does not wipe from the bird’s consciousness every sliver of awareness of thousands of years of occupation of this landscape, of cohabitation in this landscape with golden eagles, and (because it is much more flexible in its habitat requirements than golden eagles) the highways and flyways between Highland and Lowland Scotland. And what I saw one early morning above Loch Tay may have been nothing more than a parallel manifestation of the old badger-watcher’s truth: “Once an eagle highway, always an eagle highway.”
Its path is not difficult to track across the country, for the sea eagle may not need sea but it does need water. Flying west from the Tay estuary, it can travel all the way to Loch Tay simply by following the river. Or it can divert into the River Earn, which flows into the Tay near Perth, and follow that upstream all the way to Loch Earn, at which point it is only a few minutes’ flying time and one watershed south of the pines above Loch Tay. Glen Dochart is the natural way westwards from both these lochs, and with the great landmark mountains of Ben More, Ben Lui, and Ben Cruachan en route, the sea eagle can drift down Loch Etive to the Firth of Lorne and the Sound of Mull. It may sound fanciful, except that sea eagles have been seen in recent years – and continue to be seen – on every step of such a journey. They won’t all be crossing the country, of course, but they are all meeting other eagles, and many of them will cross the path of golden eagles, and the numbers of such wandering sea eagles will only increase.
The implications are considerable, as considerable as they are uncertain, for this is new terrain, not just for sea eagles, not just for eagle-watchers, but also for nature itself. In 1975 there were roughly four hundred pairs of breeding golden eagles and there still are. In 1975 there were no sea eagles at all, and now there are a few hundred birds and an established and growing breeding population (fifty-seven pairs in 2011). It follows that it is a matter of time – perhaps a decade, perhaps two decades – before sea eagles outnumber golden eagles in Scotland, and much sooner than that they will outnumber golden eagles in the islands and the West Highlands. But if, instead of human intervention in the shape of the sea eagle project, nature had contrived the unlikely circumstance that lured two breeding sea eagles to Scotland, and if the re-colonisation of Scotland by sea eagles was left solely to nature, the pace of population growth would have been a fraction of what has happened with human intervention, and I doubt if the golden eagle’s domination would have been challenged in less than a hundred years.
So nature has a new situation to come to terms with, the introduction of a seriously significant predator, but in numbers and at a speed that it would never – could never – have countenanced. That situation is essentially man-made, as man-made as the extinction of the sea eagle a century ago. Nature will adapt, of course, because that is nature’s way. How it will adapt, and how, between us, we will change the eagle landscape of Scotland, is the terrain of this book.