THEY CAME ROUND THE HILL in an angled, uneven arrowhead, the middle one of the three slightly ahead of the other two, one above and one below. I wondered if they had any idea at all of the collective impact they made on the lesser creatures of the world, not to mention the watching mortal on the edge of the wood. There was next to no light left, the sky behind them was pale grey, darkening towards the hill edge, and they were as two-dimensional charcoal-drawn birds on that blank sheet of graduated greys. They were doing nothing at all, as befits birds wrought in charcoal.

I dared a fast sideways glance with the binoculars at the rabbits’ hillside but it was folded away into cloaks of its own dusk.

Nothing at all was moving. Even the eagles seemed neither to advance or retreat, rise or fall, as if they were content with their new portion of the sky and might roost there on the wing, like swifts. A bit like swifts. The wind had fallen away from the trees and taken its voice with it. The greying earth inhaled and held its breath. It was a poet’s hour.

Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is one of the landmarks of the literature of the British landscape, and simply my favourite poem, a work of rare beauty and layered depths, of precise, extraordinary, vivid language. My admiration of it goes beyond words, and over the years I have come to think of it as a poem wrought with a landscape painter’s brushstrokes.

In the “solemn stillness” of the moment, then, three eagles had paused in the sky next to the evening hilltop I had thought might accommodate an eagle roost, then they drifted south across the face of the hill where they simply dematerialised against the fading light and the greying coalition of shadows. Where did they go? Did they settle in the valley? There is a small wood of hefty trees down there near where there must be a rabbit warren, handy for an eagle strike at first light. Or have they circled the hill and drifted up to its summit trees from below and behind? Have they settled there among the east-facing branches so that they benefit from the first rays of the earliest light? A little beyond the hill to the east is a small loch well stocked with fish, and the haunt of wild duck, geese and swans, and none of these are safe from the sheer weighted power of a hunting sea eagle, although the raw inexperience of some of the north Fife birds might make them think twice about swan or goose. But still, an exploratory dawn flight over the loch was just as likely as over the rabbit hillside.

I sat on for a darkening hour, wedged in against the woodland edge, looking as much with my ears as my eyes, although there is nothing like sitting dead still through the dusk to hone your night sight to something like the pitch of sensitivity we are all capable of. We have owl eyes if we work at night often enough for long enough. As it was, I lost the eagles in that low-lying depth of shadows, my eyes too poorly attuned for the task in hand. But once I wrote a book called Badgers on the Highland Edge (Jonathan Cape, 1994), most of the research for which was carried out in dark woods at night. I found my owl eyes then, and amazed myself. You have to keep using them of course, and most of us do not, myself included, but whenever I find myself in a situation like this, I wish there was more night life in my life. For a nature writer of all creatures, there are rarely more rewarding hours than the first and the last hours of the night.

The moon began to brighten the land despite its attendant cluster of clouds. It made the barn owl an easy spot, a shapeless patch of pale white adrift on the field edge far below me, but moving with that easy lope that characterises its hunting gait. I wondered if it might wheel about and come uphill, working the thicker grasses between the field edge and the trees where mouse and vole pickings are richer, but it clung to the valley bottom, silently working in and out of its shadows, in and out of moonlight, a heaven-sent moon for a hunting owl.

Curlews and oystercatchers began to drift inland, stabbing the air with their cries. A fox barked once… pause… again… pause… again, and was that third bark a different voice from within the wood at my back? If I was sitting on a straight line between two foxes, one of them might find me. Tawny owls laid round “ooh” vowels on the air, breathily soothing away the stab wounds, the barked harshness. The night was beginning to stir. A late tractor growled along the lane to the house behind two beams of light, crawled to a halt. The lights flicked out. The engine stuttered and cut. The night quiet deepened until it swam around me like oceans. And somewhere out there, up there, down there, or over there, three Norwegian-born sea eagles had settled into the deep shadows of a huge Victorian fir, or in the sparser shadows of the hilltop pines, or on a windless quarry ledge, or… and somewhere else, not far away, there must be others, and some of those were quite possibly among the pines that thicken the crown of the wood at my back. It was a strange, slightly eerie feeling, to consider the new possibilities of that scattered flock of Scandinavians, forcibly re-nationalised as Scots, each of them making its own accommodation with its new life in this new land in various and unpredictable ways. A handful of them (or perhaps all of them, and how would we know?) were responding to some handed-down awareness of how they might board that eagle highway that unfurled upriver and far into the west for unknown flying time, where they would find a place – a coast, an island, an ocean – facing the sunset that held essences of their original west coast home, the place of the first beginning. And there, they would find many other eagles of all ages, and golden eagles too (for they were familiar neighbours in their homeland). And these few, or these many will reconcile themselves to the West, and first to the highway that led there, and others who watched them leave would eventually be persuaded by their absence to follow.

These were the kind of thoughts I mulled over sitting in the wood above the field above the valley and below the hill with the scattered pines where I had thought a sea eagle might roost. This, I told myself, is a little different from the big rock in the eagle glen below the watershed, halfway along the highway from here to the island west. Walking back to the car in the moon-tinted darkness, I felt energised for the first time by the awareness of what had just begun to unfold here, of a wholly unpredictable journey for all nature, and I decided that I too would become the eagles’ fellow traveller between here and the far end of the highway west.

A few days later, I drove back up the same narrow north Fife road, slipped the car into the same roadside stance, silenced the engine and doused the headlights, and let the last hour of the early morning half-dark rush into the open window. I sat still while the warm engine muttered to itself the way warm engines do when they start to cool. I wanted to nullify the intrusion of my arrival before I headed out for the same tree at the top of the field. I like to be at peace with nature when I go to work. It does not take long for nature to absorb a new arrival in its midst, however unpalatable it may sound and smell when it announces itself, and if it is instantly silent, still and unthreatening, that helps the process along.

I closed my eyes and listened. Almost at once I heard soft wings, small soft wings. I opened my eyes. A wren. It was on a branch of a skinny little holly bush, about two yards away and at eye level. A wren at eye level is disconcerting. The eye is perfectly round and perfectly black and perfectly tiny. And there is only one eye because it looks at you side-headed, so you find yourself wondering if the eye you can’t see is watching something else. Then I remembered the whale eye, four inches across, and how I had taken it for nature’s messenger. And here was a wren eye – what, a millimetre across? – at more or less the same distance. “What message do you have for me?” I asked it softly.

The irony is potent. I am looking for eagles. I find a wren. In this landscape, the wren is the eagle’s fellow traveller, and that inscrutable little full stop of an eye is as much nature as the eagle’s yellow glare. And then, it occurred to me that this was not the first time in my life that eagle and wren had aligned in portentous circumstances. The following is from a book I wrote in 1990, A High and Lonely Place (Jonathan Cape). The incident happened in Gleann Einich in the Cairngorms, and in winter.

Black clouds massed over the Moine Mhor, that high plateau that sprawls away from the top of Gleann Einich’s cul-de-sac headwall. The sun fitfully blazed and snuffed out daring spot-lights so that the glen’s mountain walls were never still, never uniformly white, but every subtle shade of dark white, pale white, and sullen grey.

The river had begun to narrow yard by yard as the stranglehold of ice and heaped snow banks encroached. I paused to watch the light’s dance, decided on a brew, and as the stove wheezed I became preoccupied with a dipper’s unflinching zeal, perching on an iced rock to sing, swimming and diving down to feed after its own perversely amphibious fashion on the riverbed. Is there a grittier gladiator-of-the-wilds than the dipper, I wondered, at which point there was a tiny scuffling inches from my feet, and a determined busy-ness under the overhanging lip of the snow’s newly redefined riverbank. It was a wren.

There are times when nature’s logic is incomprehensible. There is no common species of bird in all Britain more susceptible to winter harshness than the wren, no winter climate harsher in all Britain than the Cairngorms. We – the wren and I – were three miles out beyond the pinewoods, both of us heading upstream, the wren foraging with some success in the very jaws of winter. Wrens fend off the worst of winter in communal roosts, and there are many records of wrens packed into tiny improvised shelters for warmth, including the tragic failures – forty found dead in a single nest box. It seems nothing more than a tidy way to die. So why this single bird speck on the winter face of the Cairngorms?

The coffee brewed, the wren busied on upstream, the plateau wind whipped away the towers of cloud and the sun won an unfettered hour. I was still turning over the wren conundrum, wondering what it feels like to delve into those icily sodden overhangs and pluck a spider from the white darkness, when my dawdling glance fastened on the unquestionable silhouette of a golden eagle high above Carn Elrig. It flew south-west out over the glen on unbeating wings (the wren’s were a restless blur), then launched into the matchless routine, the roller-coaster dive-and-climb of the male eagle’s display flight that would tilt the whole Cairngorms landmass into yawing skylines, the wing-folded free-fall then the turbo-charged climb power-driven beyond the comprehension of mere mortals or the consciousness of wrens. The performance marked that critical point in the wild cycle of eagle life that announces an end to the old year, the bird convinced that despite the day’s snows and the river ice that winter has frayed beyond repair. A commitment is launched to a sustained expenditure of energy that will last half a year, beginning with this stylised sky-dance.

Eagle eyries can be immense. The rigours of construction, then mating, brooding, rearing the eaglets, killing, fetching and carrying pray as large as a dog fox or a deer calf or as meagre as mouse or vole on the lean days, teaching the young the phenomenal skills of eagle flight… all of it in the face of the harshest mountain climate in the land, all of it a routine for which only eagles are fitted. After the encounter with the wren, this new beginning served to demonstrate something of the scale of nature’s repertoire which is required to fulfil the demands of the ecology of a single mountainside, a repertoire that extends from the eagle to the prey of a wren.

That same late February day, the wren was hunting down scraps of survival three thousand feet below the celebrating eagle. And even then, a hard week of frosts or prolonged snow could still kill off a tiny bird so weakened by winter. Yet when winter relents sufficiently, the wren may well nest higher than the eagle. There is nothing rare about wren nests at two thousand feet, even though they may be more familiar in your back garden. The eagle, especially if it is a tree nester, often nests several hundred feet lower here. So there will be time when a boulder-singing wren pauses in mid-chorus to look down on the formidable back and wingspan of a golden eagle bearing home a haunch of deer carrion or a brace of ptarmigan…

North Fife is not the Cairngorms, neither in its landforms nor temperament, its new eagles won’t cruise a mile high, at least not here they won’t, and there are no mountains to challenge the tenacity of pioneering wrens. Otherwise, however, the same principles are in place, the politics and the practicalities of life at the top and bottom of the food chain are much the same, and the ecology that makes a valley like this tick is as complex and infinite in its reach as Gleann Einich. The wren and I watched each other for perhaps a minute, which is a long stillness for a wakeful wren (though perhaps not for one that has just been rudely aroused from a pre-dawn doze). What disturbed our trance-like moment was the blackbird’s arrival at the other end of the wren’s branch. The wren dived down into deeper cover and was gone, the blackbird protested at something beyond my reach and vanished in the opposite direction. The holly branch was quivering and bare.

Time to go. Fifteen minutes later I was back at the top of the field where I settled once more, this time to watch the valley empty of darkness and fill with light, and to resume my pursuit of its eagles. “If,” I told myself aloud, “they are still here, that is.”

I was never so enthusiastic about dawn vigils as dusk ones, for no reason that I can put my finger on, and that despite the fact that some of my pre-dawn rises have produced moments of wildness that are still vivid twenty or thirty years after the event – an osprey standing on the edge of its eyrie near the Lake of Menteith to scatter rainwater from its plumage into the glare of a dazzling red sunrise, a barn owl that almost flew into my head at around 3am one midsummer morning, a merganser that swam past my feet without knowing I was there a yard away on the bank of its burn, an otter asleep, a skylined red deer stag that posed beside a setting moon, a wildcat on the prowl… these and other encounters punctuate the near and far contours of memory. Dusks, on the other hand, have more to do with landscape moods than memorable encounters, but in all my dusks, and for that matter all my dawns, there have been many eagles. So I sat again, poured coffee, cupped hands round it, and waited, watching the sky’s paint dry.

The “paint” began to seep in from the same wedge of sky between forest and pine-treed hilltop where the three eagles had materialised those few evenings ago. It was more or less due east of where I sat, and it began to fill hopefully with pale yellow and from the bottom up, so that it widened as it rose, a stain that spread south across the hilltop and between the pine trunks and tiny spaces between branches, then beyond the trees and down the far side of the rabbits’ side of the hill. There it lingered long enough for me to register the presence of a small horde of rabbits all across the lower slope. Surely the eagles would home in there as soon as the light brightened.

It dulled. The liquid watercolour yellow was overwhelmed by a shuddering wash of light grey travelling at twice its speed, a shroud of high cloud that precluded the spectacle of a sunrise so that dawn stole furtively round the edges of the hill instead, nibbling disconsolation around the edges of my expectant mood. So I raised my glasses to the high pines, aware that I was suddenly trying to convince that part of me that suddenly needed convincing that they offered the best prospect of early sightings, because (I reasoned with suddenly less than flawless logic) if I were a sea eagle, the high pines were where I would have roosted. At this stage of my slowly accumulating experience of watching sea eagles, I had seen three roosts – the one above Loch Tay and two on Mull, and they were all on trees with an open outlook. Here were trees, not just with an open outlook but also rabbits for breakfast, not to mention that glimpse of three eagles one evening earlier in the week. And here too, a frisson of doubt perched on my shoulder and started muttering in my ear. I flicked it away with one of my stash of convictions that I keep in a pocket in the back of my brain for just such a purpose, determinedly refocussed the glasses on the trees and the hilltop, and drifted the glasses optimistically out into the wedge of sky from time to time. Meanwhile night fled, dawn became daylight and the workaday world kicked in.

I felt rather than saw or heard the sea eagle, for it seemed to manifest itself moments before I saw it as a disturbance of air, low and to my right and (as I remember it now) too far behind my right shoulder for any kind of physical recognition to have been possible. There was a bellowing crow almost in my ear, then a second crow not far above my head, and it was clear to me before I saw them that they were furiously on the move. I turned at the sound and whatever awareness that had preceded it, twisting awkwardly round my right shoulder (that routinely stiffens at the slightest excuse), to see a sea eagle twenty yards downhill, ten yards inside the field, two yards off the ground, and swatting the air with gulping wingbeats the size of fireside rugs. The tail was startlingly white in so many shadows. The crows homed in on that tail from either flank as if it was a target being towed along by the eagle for the purpose, the nearer one close enough for me to hear the creak of its wings, the further one diving down, a yard behind the eagle and closing.

Then there was a moment of connection. The eagle, besieged by his black tormentors, suddenly looked upwards and left, and made eye contact. God, the whale again! My head and shoulder movement to confront the crow noise were more than enough to betray my presence. As with the whale, I now have an image of that sea eagle pinned to the inside wall of my skull for my brain to look at whenever it needs one. The eye – the one side-headed eye like the wren – is pale yellow, its shade prefigured in that first dawn flush. It is darkly hooded. It sits high in the profile of the head, which is lightly mottled pale grey and fawn, and just astern of that massive yellow hooked slab of a beak. You reach for the word “massive” a lot with sea eagles.

Memory has fixed that eye just ahead of the “elbow” of the left wing at the moment the wing reaches the lowest, widest reach of the downstroke. The “flying barn door” cliché that so many media outlets insist on dropping into every mention of sea eagles is but one perception of the bird, as seen by craning necks and heads from far below. (In truth, it was a phrase carelessly used by a crofter in conversation with naturalist Roy Dennis, which Roy subsequently quoted in an interview, and which has since become the inevitable media shorthand.) But the bottom of the downstroke at close quarters and from slightly above reveals a bird cloaked in a corrugated drapery of up-curved feathers, folds and folds of feathers of such a size that they redefine the very word “feather” in your mind. No part of what I can see looks like a bird shape, but the whole thing rather presents the form of a bluntly cornered and tilted triangle, the wing elbow at the apex, the tail feathers at the right corner and the primaries of one wingtip at the other. Only that eye, forehead and beak protrude beyond the smother of feathers.

The upswing begins, the head vanishes, the triangle collapses and the moment is done. In its place there is an articulate eagle, low and unhurried over the field with two crows in thankless pursuit. The eagle contrives a mid-air convulsion that flips the whole, improbably nimble mass on its back so that, instantly, the crows are confronted not with a white tail to torment but with a raised pair of eagle talons. It is enough. They wheel away in formation and climb back to the trees at the edge of the field where they try to restore a semblance of dignity. The eagle reverses the convulsion and resumes its low-level flight, which appears to have rabbit as its destination.

Such is the joyous unpredictability of working with young eagles in a new landscape. We – eagle and eagle-watcher – are making it up as we go along, and then revising what we have made up almost as soon as it is made. I had made my best guesses based on my frail grasp of sea eagle logic, not quite knowing whether such a thing even exists. I had settled on a particular corner of a particular landscape based on the little I thought I knew, only to have a sea eagle ambush me from behind. I watched it fly towards the rabbit field, but about two hundred yards short of the field it banked and climbed and perched high in the open edge of that small plantation of big conifers. Then it began to preen, with a settled-looking I-may-be-some-time air. I scouted with the glasses all over the sky and in every corner of the land that was available to me from where I sat, but the preener in the tree was the only eagle in sight. So I decided while I waited for events to unfurl that I would try and reconstruct the sequence of events that had just unfurled behind my back. The trees between the road and the field, and which were immediately behind where I first saw the eagle, were too awkwardly spaced and too thickly branched for such a huge bird to have flown through them, yet it was surely too close to the trees and too low to have flown over them.

Two possibilities occurred to me. One was that the eagle had flown up the edge of the field and I had not seen it simply because I was facing the other way. But the crows had only given voice at the very last minute when the eagle was already very close, and I know from many years of watching golden eagles that crows are smart and sharp-eyed, noticing creatures that will travel hundreds of yards to harass them, hurling abuse the whole way. It was clear that here the crows had travelled no distance at all to greet the sea eagle, and that could only mean that it had astonished them as it astonished me.

So the second possibility is this: the eagle was there all the time.

It was there, perched in the trees between the road and the field, and facing across the field to the hill. Perched in the trees when its head swung round to glare at the nature of the intrusion represented by my car engine and headlights, relaxing again in the silence that followed when the sound and the lights died. But then there was the blackbird alarm; alarmed at whatever it was I failed to see – eagle?

Perched in the trees when the car door closed, not loud, but deafeningly conspicuous at that moment in that landscape, the sound placed by the eagle precisely where the car engine had stopped. Perched in the trees and glaring at the place where I stepped beyond the fence into the field edge and began walking uphill towards its very tree, adjusting its head position minutely and moment by moment as I came closer. Perched in the trees when I walked beneath the very tree not looking up but looking out across the field to the silhouetted hill with its pines believing those distant trees might harbour eagles. Still perched in the trees when I reached the high corner of the field and turned right, hugging the fence, taking pains to stay with the shadows so that I would not reveal myself to eagle eyes that might be scanning the dawn field.

By now the eagle’s head had swung through 180 degrees, and it was still perched in the trees when I sat and grew still, and it decided I posed no threat, and that at least until daylight came, stillness would serve its cause best. When daylight did finally arrive the crows spotted the eagle and urged it on its way, but not perhaps until it flew, and it had fooled them all that time with its tree-coloured stillness. But its sideways glance up at me as it flew confirmed its first appraisal: no threat.

If it seemed to me to be extraordinary behaviour for an eagle, it was only because the eagle with which I am familiar is not this one, because a golden eagle would not be seen dead in Fife – even north Fife. And because in those few and far-flung corners of Scotland where golden eagles can be seen from roads they almost never perch close to them, and the odd exception that proves that rule would be a distant blur heading for the horizon by the time any vehicle driver with local eagle knowledge parked, opened and closed a door, shouldered a pack and turned to look around.

There is a sense of thrill in the back of my throat as I stitch together the threads of that second possibility. As much as anything else I can think of, it is like the visitation of the whale, the eye contact housed in such outsize spectacle. This stranger on the shore of my boyhood and youth has not only turned my head and forced me to consider the place of eagles – all eagles – on the historic map of my country; it has also beckoned me home and out of the Highland surroundings where my life had dropped anchor so that I might consider the new prospect of eagles in the place where my childhood self once looked up at a skein of geese and took nature’s hand for the first time. The wonder of it was scarcely containable.

And yet, and yet, these same sea eagles that had begun to enthral me were also making enemies with axes to grind. The old morbid loathing of anything with a hooked beak is surely our most stubbornly enduring Victorian legacy, and its disciples have never had a hooked beak quite like this one with which to vent their spleen and grind their axes. The Scottish media, which rarely reports wildlife stories without either throwing up its hands in horror or making trite jokes, seems to delight in their anger uncritically. The sea eagle that attacked the minister just over the hill there is a case in point. It later emerged that he was not attacked by a sea eagle, his prize-winning rare-breed (and unprotected!) geese were attacked and he had cornered the bird in the wooden goose-house and inadvertently blocked its exit, so as it tried to escape he was an obstacle the sea eagle tried to do something about. He conceded that he eventually subdued it by standing on its wings, so he was hardly a victim here. Then there was a farmer near Perth who showed off a dead lamb to a newspaper photographer, telling the world that it had been killed by a sea eagle. Tests subsequently showed that it had not been killed by a sea eagle, but by then the original headlines had done their work. And then there was the woman who witnessed a mid-air attack by a sea eagle on a swan, and without stopping to consider the possibility that such a spectacle is as old as swans and sea eagles, chose to rage to a reporter that “these birds are killing on a whole different level now”, adding what has become an increasingly frequent refrain, “what’s next – a child?”

And so on and so on, and the anger grows and rumbles in the fields and low hills around the Tay estuary like thunder. Hysteria is so much louder than wonder. It serves to underline more tellingly than anything that has happened here since we killed off the last wolf, how wide the gulf has become between our everyday lives and the everyday lives of nature, how impenetrable our lack of understanding has become since we annihilated the big predators. And now that a new predator has been restored to a landscape where we never expected to see it because most of us never knew it had ever existed here, the truth is that we don’t know what to do with it or how to respond to it in a way that is relevant to the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth. It disappoints and depresses me.

Then suddenly an email from a friend arrived about the day she met her first sea eagle on Tentsmuir beach, which is north Fife’s most north-easterly corner, a spectacular place of pinewood and sand dunes, seal colonies and sea birds, and a seaward view as wide as the sky and a sky the size of the North Sea. Ann Lolley works for a small community-environment trust and I had just done a little bit of work with her in Dundee. I liked her attitude, and when I heard about her sea eagle I asked her to write it down for me, thinking she might have something interesting to say about it. I got rather more than I bargained for. This is what she wrote:

On a rather grey summer afternoon, characteristic of much of 2012, I decided to leave work early and go for a walk along the beach at Tentsmuir. I don’t know what nudged me into taking this decision since this was an extremely unusual thing for me to do. However, Tentsmuir is a favourite place for me and when going there alone I choose times when there are unlikely to be many people. That grey weekday afternoon there were only one or two cars scattered among the trees.

I parked between two Scots pines and, as usual, set off over the dunes and straight to the beach. I must admit that sea eagles were not on my mind at that very moment. However, I had been speaking to a friend about them earlier in the day, saying I still hadn’t seen one of the Fife birds, and was he sure I would know one when I saw one? He assured me I would.

I stepped from the dunes to see the familiar wide expanse of beach and sea, and there, right in front of me and barely five or six metres from where I stood, was a large bird standing stock-still. It was looking at me in profile with one very large clear eye; a huge hooked beak, closed wing, and touch of white tail were all visible.

Instinctively, I stood still, expecting him to fly off the moment he saw me. He didn’t. We stood still, simply looking at each other, somehow timeless, present; my mind had been stopped in its tracks.

Who knows how long we stood like this? It struck me then that the bird had no fear of me, and that I, rather than seeing him, felt his presence from a place deep within me, somehow absorbing and knowing his essence. I heard my inner voice say, “Hello, you must be mister sea eagle,” and it was like the bird was also acknowledging me. The sea eagle and I were greeting each other with “Namaste, the divine part of me welcomes the divine part of you… and likewise the other.”1

It was a meeting similar to that “knowing” when feeling a strong connection towards a person you have only just met, no need for words; somehow you know that they know something of you, that you hold a part of them in you. My sense is that such situations are always mutual even though we do not often pluck up the courage to acknowledge it to ourselves, let alone to the other, be it bird or man.

The size and perfection of the bird and its one clear eye which held contact with mine seemed to mesmerise me and hold me in a state of wonder. Somehow I understood deep within myself that there must be a reason for our meeting. This was an offering. He was saying: “If you just slow down and take more time, then these are the things that will be revealed to you; they are things worth more than a thousand precious jewels.”

Then just as easily, he opened his wings and took off, the white tail now very visible as he headed off to the west. He was in no hurry as he lifted into the sky, everything happening in slow motion.

As he left it was like something shifted for me and I was released from my stillness. I moved quickly to the spot where he had stood, expecting to see clear, huge, sea eagle footprints or at least claw prints in the sand. Had he left something tangible behind for me? Nothing remained. Just the image in my mind’s eye of his eye.

As I continued my walk along the beach, my mind now back in action, I realised that I’d thought my first sea eagle experience would be of “the barn door in the sky”, not an eye-to-eye contact on a beach where I felt that if I had moved quickly I could have caught him in my arms.

Thinking back, 2012 was for me the year of two other intimate encounters with creatures of the natural world. Around springtime I had met a hare in my garden, no more than a couple of metres away. We stood watching each other over my rhubarb patch for several minutes, him cleaning his long ears and me thinking, “Is this really a hare, and why is he hanging around here?” Later in the year while solo kayaking round Holy Island off Arran, I spotted a rather large fin and tail: I was being accompanied by a basking shark on my paddle around the island.

It was a year for me of closely connecting with some other inhabitants of the earth, air and water, seemingly through their choice, not mine. Perhaps such species have the role of reaching out and mesmerising us enough to make us change all of our destructive habits that impact on the earth. If we truly begin to know that we are connected to everything on this planet and in the universe, perhaps we will change our actions. Maybe we will become the final element that will bring about change?

Such testimony does not make good headlines. Its passive, internalised nature cannot compete with the uncensored ravings of the “threat to our children” school of thought in our headline-hungry, Internet-obsessed climate. So you might think that any hopes that the stranger on the shore might be accorded a hospitable welcome in the wider community and a thoughtful one in the media is more pie-in-the-sky than flying barn door.

And yet a woman who was not even sure she would know a sea eagle if she saw one was moved by what was a pretty startling encounter not to fear or rage but to stillness, admiration, and a sense of connection. The trouble, from the sea eagle’s point of view at least, is that people who do make that kind of connection with nature usually experience it quietly and alone and lack either the opportunity or the inclination to articulate it. If they could, I believe that many people would marvel at it, and nature would win many more friends. None of us knows, incidentally, how we might respond to the circumstances Ann Lolley encountered unless we encounter them for ourselves. I certainly don’t. I have never had a standing sea eagle stare me down from a few yards away then entered into a partnership of stillness with it. Having read Ann’s account, I can imagine how I might respond, but unless and until it happens, I won’t know for sure.

More importantly, the point is that for every irate headline that sea eagles inspire around the Tay estuary as they try to find their feet in what is still a strange land, there are dozens of unrecorded encounters and sightings, for the people who have them do so in states of unreported indifference or fascination or rapture or something in between. It may yet be that in the folk mind the sea eagles out there on the cliffs, the evening tree roosts, dicing with the wind turbines in haar and low cloud, drifting down to torment the eider duck rafts on the Tay, lifting a trout from under the noses of the anglers on Lindores Loch or Loch Leven, or standing tall and motionless like a grey-brown lighthouse with a single sunlit eye on the sand at Tentsmuir… it may be that the folk mind is quietly coming to terms with them and learning if not to love them at least to admire them and to find a new respect for nature’s audacity in what to most of us is still the most unlikely of landscapes for eagles. Far in the west, at the Atlantic end of the eagle highway, the protests are the exception to the rule now. Mull announces itself to the world as the Eagle Island, and nature has won all the arguments.

At the top of the field facing the hill, I stirred stiffly and stood to ease limbs from their long stillness. The sun had never quite got the hang of the early morning and retreated into high cloud. The eagle that had treated me to a fly-past had been more or less motionless in its tree for around two hours now. Then suddenly it was airborne. I had stood up without the binoculars either in my hand or round my neck, and in my haste to find them I stood on them, smearing mud on the lenses. (I have never been a great respecter of technical equipment, and sometimes the technical equipment bites me back in revenge. Binoculars fit comfortably within my definition of “technical equipment”.) I wiped them on the inside of my sweatshirt, which was the handiest surface for the job, while trying to keep the eagle in sight. I lost it briefly against the low ground then found it again, much higher and against the sky. Just as I was wishing I had seen what must have been a spectacular power climb (I was guessing – I have seen golden eagles do it many times), I caught a new movement low over the rabbits’ hillside and realised that I was now watching two eagles, one with a white tail (now clearly visible in the more or less cleaned glasses) and one, much higher, without a white tail. Where had that come from?

I watched the rabbit hunter, saw its flight steepen then level out then slow abruptly as it adjusted to the rabbit slung beneath it. The fluency was impressive, the rabbit was simply plucked from the hillside in much the same way that this eagle tribe takes a fish or a duck from water without getting its feet wet. Then I watched the higher bird cruising in wide circles. I saw it descend slowly, awkwardly, and with none of the other bird’s fluency. Two rushed passes across the hillside produced nothing at all and cleared the place of rabbits, and the eagle perched in the very tree where the white-tailed bird had sat for two hours. It struck me then that, deprived of the opportunity to learn from a parent bird, this younger eagle had been watching the adult with the white tail, which is the sea eagle’s badge of maturity; may even have been following it around to watch and learn how it did things. One way or another, nature finds ways to feed itself or perishes in the attempt.

I called a halt to the early morning shift. I walked back down the field edge to the car. I was stowing my pack and boots when I saw two sea eagles about fifty yards apart and heading south. I watched them through the binoculars; one with a white tail, one without. I lost them after about a mile, but because I know what lies in the south that might interest them, I decided to follow by car, which is not quite as preposterous as it sounds. Half an hour and several distant glimpses of the pair later, I was in a hide at the RSPB’s Vane Farm reserve at Loch Leven watching two sea eagles drift round a shoulder of Bishop’s Hill, one with a white tail and one without. The thousands of birds that throng the reserve and the loch have always had wildfowlers with guns to worry about, and foxes and peregrines, but now the stakes have been raised, and now they have those new and fearful shadows darkening their sky.

I am still no wiser about where they roosted, but I’m not done looking yet.

1 Namaste: In the Indian subcontinent, a gesture of placing the hands together at the heart chakra (point through which energy flows), closing the eyes and bowing. The word literally means “I bow to you”. In the West, the word is usually spoken; in India, the gesture suffices. It acknowledges the soul in one by the soul of another.