THE COTTAGE STILL CROUCHES a little below the main road through Glen Dochart. It has been spruced up since my day, when it leaked weather through walls, windows, doors and roof, and field mice nested in the sofa, among other places. Glen Dochart is an ancient route through the heart of Scotland, and something of a bridge between southern and northern Highlands and for that matter, eastern and western Highlands, but without ever seeming to encompass any of the qualities of any of them in particular. From the early spring of 1998 until the autumn of 2003 I lived here. It was like living in a temperate rainforest without the forest, which has mostly been removed.

More days than not, I saw golden eagles from the back garden – “garden” being a euphemism for a fenced-off piece of hillside – but the eagles and the situation more than compensated for the shortcomings of the cottage. Whatever the shortcomings of my life at the time (and these comfortably outweighed the shortcomings of the cottage), I worked well here. In five years I re-wrote and revised a new edition of my Cairngorms book, A High and Lonely Place, to mark the tenth anniversary of the original; I wrote my two novels, The Mountain of Light and The Goalie; and a collection of nature essays, Something Out There (all published by Keith Whittles). I also spent almost a month in Alaska to make two radio programmes for the BBC Natural History Unit. I have rarely been so creatively productive.

On good days I used to haul a small kitchen table out into the garden to write in the sun. I had buzzards for near neighbours, four of them in the sky at any one time was routine, but I got to recognise that when all four leaped from the two small spruce plantations behind the house at the same time and began crying incessantly, it usually meant an eagle was in the offing, cruising across the lower rabbit-thronged hillside. The tract of rock and bog and rough grazing that climbed from the back garden to the mountains seemed to mark a notional northern frontier for two pairs of golden eagles, or perhaps it was just that they shied away from the main road and if they did cross it, they liked a lot of height between them and its human traffic, for I never saw them cross it once.

Four buzzards acting on the same impulse and in common cause was a conspicuous enough event to lift my head from the work. I scanned the sky first, but it was empty, then the nearer low ground and there I found the eagle, low and slow and with a not-quite-dead rabbit still twitching in its talons. The eagle was a young male, his white wing-and-tail patches showing his immaturity, and he had a peculiar relationship with the resident pair in the eagle glen beyond the watershed. His ambitions centred on the huge dark female (the pale female’s predecessor in the eagle glen) but her mate saw to it that he was not allowed to linger near her, not that that stopped him from trying. So he would cross the watershed and head for the rabbit warren where he would weave soundlessly through the piercing, four-fold hostility of the buzzards, and with his talons lowered, choose a rabbit from the hundreds on offer at any one moment, then turn and labour back to the watershed and (if the coast was clear), deliver the rabbit to the eyrie. It was extraordinary behaviour, but he did it again and again throughout that long nesting season.

Mostly, over the decades of watching the eagle glen, I have climbed to it and to the watershed from the south. The Glen Dochart years altered my perspective of the place, not least because my routine walks from the back door took me immediately into the eagles’ hunting territory, but also into the territory of the neighbouring pair. The territories seemed to fluctuate (as much with wind direction as anything), but the burn that fell from the hills to my garden was a rough demarcation line: a mile east or west of it, and I was sure of the eagles I would see.

There was an afternoon of mid-July, by which time the day’s writing was bogged down and going nowhere. (Ernest Hemingway insisted that you should quit your shift while the work was still going well so that you would pick up the good work when you sat down again the next day. Easy for you, Hem, but I never had that kind of courage. I wrung every drop of nectar from the good days in case there was no more nectar.) It seemed to me back then that there was a species of rain unique to Glen Dochart as merciless as loneliness. It shuttered the landscape, stilled and drenched the air, silenced birds, and seeped greyly into a hungry human heart. Sometimes the writing mind is a two-edged sword that feeds on the solitary nature of the process out of necessity and which in turn demands that the writer’s resources are robust. That July afternoon, both edges were blunt. Then I looked up and saw that the room had lightened. I took my unworthy mood to the back door, swathed it in waterproofs and boots, threw some food in a small pack and closed the door behind me.

The air smelled of the woods and the rain. Beyond the woods it smelled of bog myrtle, that sublime reviver. The rain was faltering at last and I peered up through its fraying curtain towards a clearing hill shoulder from where the shouts of crows drifted down. There were three of them and they were mobbing an eagle that was perched on a rock. I had been seeing an eagle above that skyline regularly over several weeks, and assumed it would be the young male drifting in and out of the eagle glen territory into the vacant one nearby (a mysterious vacancy, a sudden and unexplained gap in a long history of continuous occupation; what changed?).

An hour up and out from the cottage I reached the skyline, and sat for a breather on the sodden mountain among thinning shreds of cloud. It was quiet and still, and I felt my mood lifting, the day breasting a watershed of the mind. Then a voice sounded from a nearby rock, a voice like the shyest of penny whistlers, as if the player had changed his mind about playing at all after the first note had sounded, so that the note had a tiny upward inflexion as the fingers lifted off. It was the voice of the mountain’s softest alarm call and the signature of a golden plover, gold backed and crowned, black faced and fronted, and between gold and black an elegantly curved and carefully worn scarf of white. The bird stood blatantly on its rock, a confident profile, the short, dark bill opening and closing again and again to play the shy, one-note whistle, relentless as cuckoos. It is the easiest of bird calls to imitate and soon we were penny-whistling to each other like two old cronies at a ceilidh. But with my head turned towards the plover and my preoccupation with its music, I missed something that was unfolding at my back, until that inexplicable sensitivity to something unseen and unheard but rather felt, like a warm breeze on my cheek, demanded my attention and I turned away to look up the ridge.

As I turned, a piece of the ridge detached itself and became mobile, became low-flying fluency, became eagle, not a quarter of a mile away and closing. The thinning cloud had revealed my presence as an unfamiliar shape on the eagle’s landscape, and this being the perfect example of a golden eagle confident in its landscape, it chose to inspect me. It flew past about fifty yards away and slightly below the level of the rock where I perched, looking at me side-headed – that one-eyed glare again – with fire in its eye. I raised a hand, hoping the bird would read the submissiveness of its gesture, but as likely as not it saw only my intrusion.

And this was not the young bird from the far glen but a mature male with a pale head but not a shred of white in his plumage. Then again something turned me round to face up the ridge once more, and a second eagle rose from the ground not a hundred yards away. How had I missed that? How long had it been there? In its talons as it contoured away round the hill was the slumped shape of a small bird. In the few seconds when I was able to bring the glasses to bear on it, I recognised the pale gold of a female golden plover. So I turned back to the penny-whistler’s rock: gone without trace. His is one of the lesser shapes of the hill that immobilises and trusts in stillness when the eagle shadow crosses.

Questions:

Was this a new pair of eagles?

Was there an eyrie much nearer to the cottage than I had imagined? All this was at the “wrong” end of the glen from the traditional eyries, yet if this was a new pair on an old territory, was it so unthinkable that they would work from a new eyrie site?

If there was no new eyrie, why was the second eagle carrying prey away round the hill in the “wrong” direction?

More circumstantial evidence: the second eagle suddenly reappeared crossing the skyline without its prey, so the prey had been dropped off nearby, or at least dropped.

More questions:

A new eyrie just round that hill shoulder?

Just beyond the skyline?

A territory no one else knows about (a wholly unworthy thrill smote me at that prospect)?

Then the two birds were together, flying on parallel courses far out across the glen, cruising at two thousand feet. I went in search of answers. Four hours later, four hours of knee-wrenching, foot-sliding, muscle-wearying contours and crags and spaces between crags, I arrived back at the same rock to be met by the same golden plover on its rock. I had answered none of my questions, but I had satisfied myself once again about the power of the high and lonely places to pacify a bruised human spirit, the solace that I have always derived from the terrain of eagles.

I pulled my small and well-worn whisky flask from my pack, raised it towards the hills that accommodated the timeless coexistence of eagle and plover: “Until the next time!”

Until I climb again, until I trespass again on the four-season realm of eagles, the spring and summer realm of the penny whistler that may or may not have still had a mate, the lifelong realm of the nature writer with a wilderness thirst to slake and a headful of questions that demand answers, so that they can become words on the page and improve his understanding of his portion of the wild world.

Two years after I left Glen Dochart and moved south over the hill to Balquhidder, the east coast sea eagle project began. Seven or eight years after I left, I had begun to piece together the notion of the eagle highway as more and more sightings became common knowledge at many points along the route I had been guessing about – the Tay estuary to Mull. By the time I had established for myself that the route diverged where the Earn joined the Tay, I had a good idea from the nature of reported sightings further west that the two divergent branches converged again on a single centrepiece – Glen Dochart. Sea eagles that follow the Earn will gravitate naturally towards the west end of Loch Earn, for there, right above the village of Lochearnhead, is a crossroads as old as the very shape of the landscape for travelling birds of many tribes. The tendency of the land hereabouts to open up in east-west glens is burst apart by a great north-south intrusion. Northwards then westwards, Glen Ogle carries the high road to Glen Dochart; southwards, a two-fold trough carries both Glen Ample and the low road to Callander, Stirling, and the Lowlands; Strathearn itself opens up the east. Spring after spring for most of the ten thousand or so springs since the last ice age finished reshaping the land, hordes of geese have hesitated at that crossroads high above Lochearnhead, circling and climbing, circling and climbing, until at last they achieve the necessary height and visibility that shows the way north then north-west, next stop Iceland, Greenland, or wherever. Autumn after autumn their migrations split apart here – south or east. They are the most visible manifestation of the role that crossroads plays in nature’s annual rituals, and their behaviour pattern is mimicked by countless other bird travellers. The west-making sea eagles, even in their infant years, cannot fail to recognise the landscape significance of that crossroads. Some will baulk at that wall of hills with its single narrow escape route to the north and west, and these will turn south instead, perhaps to follow Glen Ample and cross the high moors east towards Argaty, near Doune, where large numbers of red kites routinely swarm around a feeding station to the delight of human visitors in a nearby bird hide. Sea eagles are regular visitors there. Others have dallied among the lochs and rivers of the Trossachs, but as yet they have never lingered long. But mostly, the birds’ pursuit of a sunset-facing, island-strewn west coast, fuelled by thousands of years of Nordic inheritance, will point them towards Glen Ogle, and lift them over its high pass and down into the gathering centre of all that land where the eagle highway unifies again and strengthens into the way west – into Glen Dochart.

For birds that travelled by way of the Tay, the journey has perhaps been simpler. The river has led them naturally to Loch Tay where the mountains on the north shore and lower hills of the south shore channel the way west. And it is at Killin at the west end of the loch that the River Dochart itself swerves gracefully into Loch Tay, carrying with it water from the ultimate river source in all Scotland, from the Tay’s furthest tributary, a tiny lochan high on a flank of Ben Lui, not thirty miles from the Atlantic coast, and from where the mountains of Mull must surely look like nothing so much as a glimpse of Valhalla to a Norwegian-born sea eagle. At Lix Toll, two miles west of Killin and five miles north of Lochearnhead, the two divergent streams of the eagle highway reunite in a single confident westward thrust of momentum. A mile west along Glen Dochart’s flat-bottomed glacial valley, then, the cottage still crouches, and there are new eagles to add to the endless march of travellers that pass a few yards from the front door.

I was double-crossed by the month of March on the ninth. For its first eight days that least predictable of Highland months had blithely picked up and run with what had stretched out of late February into a two-week spell blessed with portents of spring: dawn birdsong, drumming woodpeckers, nest-building ravens, the daffodils’ silent crescendo of goldening trumpets along the bank of the burn, the stupendous sky dance of golden eagles a thousand feet higher. But all that was gagged, hobbled, and refrigerated by a snow-burdened north-easterly that would do its worst for the rest of the month and deep into April. On the ninth, the day when the Judas wind shuddered down the east of the land, I hastened west just beyond the reach of its blizzards (although its Arctic breath was on the air) to the deep green sanctuary of a Scots pine wood on the shore of Loch Tulla, six hundred feet up in the east-facing folded lap of the mountains of Glenorchy and Inishail.

Glen Dochart, and to a certain extent Strath Fillan beyond, is a kind of decompression chamber that sheds lesser notions of Highland landscape and equips the traveller’s mind to accommodate the different intensity of that landscape that lies beyond, whether the journey is further west or north. It is not exactly an original concept. I encountered something like it in the Ardnamurchan poet Alasdair Maclean’s book Night Falls on Ardnamurchan (Penguin, 1984), in which he described the Corran Ferry as “a kind of mobile decompression chamber where various kinds of pollution were drained from the blood and I was fitted to breathe pure air again”. I was very taken with the notion that it was helpful to adjust from the uncivilised influences of the mainland at your back to the island-like peninsula of Ardnamurchan, and that the ferry provided the crucial respite.

Likewise, the southernmost Highlands around Balquhidder have a beguiling landscape softness that dispels in Glen Dochart, but it is only once you are beyond the glen and through the village of Tyndrum that the road kicks northwards in a great climbing loop, and from that moment on, the mountains close in and crowd round and the Highlands become a different creature. Even the vast open spaces of Rannoch Moor feel more like a mountain plateau than a huge bog, and as soon as you cross it, there is the small matter of Glencoe to deal with. But it is the towering, unbroken sweep of Beinn Dorain’s south-facing profile that offers the first of many mountain milestones that will stop the traveller in his tracks and drop his jaw once he emerges beyond Glen Dochart. Beinn Dorain is the Mountain of the Otter, apparently, although no one you might ask seems to know why; nor why for that matter, given that its name is a phonetic corruption, it should derive from dobhrain (an otter) rather than dorainn (pain or torment). But then the Gaels’ naming of the landscape was based either on local tradition or the way that the landscape looked from where they lived, which was in communities of which most have vanished at the insistence of sundry oppressors over many centuries. Inconsistent spelling, anglicisation that was haphazard and as careless as it was uncaring, and just the passage of time that has carried off with it the sources of so many names… all that has mangled many a poetic or prosaic christening into meaningless hybrids. The land shrugs its indifference to all that. It has no opinion on what we call it, but our understanding of its history is so much poorer because time has been so careless with it.

Nevertheless, many an eagle still nests or likes to perch on, or identifies its territory with conspicuous rocks called Creag na h-Iolaire. And many a sea eagle, whether embedded in the resurgent strongholds of the island west or wandering that way along the highway from the east, will recognise those rocks for what they are, and be intrigued by them because in eagle eyes they are the most coveted of places, as they were before the landscape was named. Once an eagle rock, always an eagle rock. Besides, sea eagles have been here before.

Two distinguished eagle authorities two or three generations apart – John Love and Seton Gordon – have identified historic sea eagle eyries hereabouts on islands in lochs. Loch Tulla is one of these. John Love’s name is synonymous with the sea eagles of Scotland because he was the Nature Conservancy Council’s choice to lead the reintroduction project on Rum, and he has written the bird’s Scottish history. He identified over a hundred historic nest sites in Scotland, mostly in the Hebrides, and fifty more in Ireland. Of that part of Argyll that conducts my notional eagle highway westwards to the sea, he wrote that they “frequented the mainland hills of Creran and Etive” and that further inland they nested in a small tree on a tiny island at Loch Tulla. When I read that comment it rang a bell and put Seton Gordon in my mind, for I was sure he had written something similar. I trawled through a few of his books until I found what I was looking for.

So I invited myself on a fool’s errand on this short diversion to see if I could track the spoor of the sea eagle on the edge of Rannoch Moor more than a hundred years after it had vacated the premises. And at the back of my mind was the straw I had begun to clutch: once an eagle rock, always an eagle rock. Or in this case, eagle tree. Besides, long experience of this kind of escapade has taught me that putting in the hours out in the landscape I’m writing about always pays off; sooner or later something or other turns up that I would not have known about if I hadn’t gone. So I turned off the main road beneath Beinn Dorain at Bridge of Orchy for the single-track road to Loch Tulla, where the old pinewood relic is a particular favourite of mine.

Alasdair Maclean’s decompression chamber proposition actually works. Or maybe I only think it works because I found the idea so engaging in the first place, and having adopted it to underpin an idea in my own mind, I wanted to be convinced by it. But stepping from the car into boots, jacket, gloves and pinewood felt like being reinvented as a denizen of a more rarefied world where nature is a more demanding presence. These are harder-edged Highlands, cold, uncompromising and austerely beautiful. From now on, all the way to the north coast if you care for such a journey, these qualities only intensify.

And there, after only a few minutes’ walk along the loch’s pinewood shore, is the tiny island that once accommodated a sea eagle nest. It is not hard to identify. It is the only island in the loch. And it still has trees of a kind. The stony ground and the onslaughts of pretty well every wind that ever blew have restricted and twisted the ambitions of four larch trees, which could be of almost any age at all. The solitary pine that keeps them company is dead straight and slim and surely a young tree. The piled stones that showed above the waterline made me wonder if it was a crannog. The map thinks it’s an island and gives it a name – Eilean an Stalcair, the Stalker’s Island. I wonder if it is the smallest island in the land that has a name. And once upon a time, it had a sea eagle’s nest, a thing of such monstrous dimensions that it must have looked as if it might destabilise and capsize the whole island. Any day now, if the eagle highway works in both directions, such a nest might transform the island’s modest profile again. The Argyll Bird Club’s outstanding book Birds of Argyll (2007) pinpoints the presence of the bird not just on the islands of Mull, Jura, Islay, Lismore and Kerrera, “but also, less frequently, from more land-locked water bodies, for example Loch Awe… Birds of up to two or three years old can be particularly itinerant; for example, within two years of fledging on Mull, one was seen on Jura, Islay, coastal Mid-Argyll, inland North Argyll and Morvern.” Inland North Argyll means places like Loch Tulla and Loch Ba. The grapevine that whispers through these places has already brought word of that mightiest of bird silhouettes low over the waters of Loch Tulla in the spring of 2010. It did not linger but it was there, and now of course it knows the way.

So birds from the west, and especially the breeding stronghold of Mull, are spreading east and inland as well as up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and as they do so they are encountering historic territories of their species, they are encountering sea eagles making for the west coast from the east, and they are encountering golden eagles, and all of these are incentives to linger in places like Loch Tulla and Loch Ba. And given that we already know they have been seen on Loch Awe (a short flight the length of Glen Orchy south-west from Loch Tulla) and Loch Etive (a flight of about the same distance to the west from Luch Tulla), it is a brave man who would bet against the sight and sound of sea eagles nesting once again (and with delicious irony) on the Stalker’s Island.

I settled into the lee of a generous Scots pine trunk and focussed the binoculars on the island. The biggest of the larches appears to have broken about two thirds of the way up the trunk, and the break appears from the distance of the shore as a dark, squat, vertical shape that reminded me of nothing so much as that unprepossessing, grey-brown, shapeless “embellishment” I first saw on a rock on Mingulay the day that sea eagles first entered my life.

It couldn’t be?

Could it?

It could not possibly be that at the very moment I had turned up with binoculars and a clutched straw, and after an interval of more than a hundred years, that my visit coincided with a sea eagle visit, that it was perching on a tree on the very scrap of island that sea eagles once called home.

Could it?

I stared and stared at that dark shape, willing it to move, to throw wings like a crumpled parachute above its head and metamorphose out across the loch on articulate wings. How I stared and how I willed. Two hours later, it had declined to become animated, leaving me to conclude reluctantly that it was a piece of broken larch tree. But in those intervening hours I had discovered what was unmistakably an osprey nest in the top of a dead pine, and intact enough to convince me that it had been in use the previous year. Strange how ospreys keep cropping up on sea eagle waters, or perhaps it is the other way round. Records suggest this might be something of a new frontier in Argyll’s slowly re-establishing osprey population although it has already returned to historic haunts on Loch Awe, and passing birds have paused here on October migration flights south. I chose to treat the discovery as a good omen. If ospreys can find their way here so can sea eagles, for the loch is ideal for them both and for the same reasons.

A month later, I was back, and now I was looking for eagle and osprey, and in the meantime it had occurred to me that just as wandering sea eagles seem to be attracted towards the company of golden eagles, they might also be attracted towards the company of ospreys, especially nesting ospreys. My plan was to look at the island in better light, and follow up another whisper about a sea eagle nearby, but it was thwarted by the discovery of an osprey, newly arrived and very conspicuously perched on the rim of last year’s nest. I couldn’t watch the island without also disturbing the ospreys, and there are laws about these things. So I drove on north for a few minutes and a handful of miles to Loch Ba.

Seton Gordon died at the age of ninety in 1978 and just three years after John Love’s project began on Rum. What I had been looking for in his books was an intriguing story about a sea eagle nest on a birch tree on an island on Loch Ba. I thought at first it might have been the same island nest, but both Seton Gordon and John Love are specific enough in the details to be certain – two lochs five miles apart, two different islands, two different nests on two different trees. What we don’t know is whether or not it was two different eagle pairs. Seton Gordon’s adult life had been largely devoted to an exploration of the Highlands, its landscape, wildlife, people, music (he was a piper and piping judge) and its language. “A man may be said to live on after his death through his books,” wrote John Muir, and that was as true of Seton Gordon as it was of Muir himself. He had the ear of keepers and landowners, and some very useful friends in high places besides (his telescope was a gift from the Prince of Wales) and he used their knowledge and their stories to amplify his own relentless and skilful fieldwork. Eagles held a particular fascination for him, and my own writing has known no higher honour than to be asked by publisher Keith Whittles in 2003 to write an introduction to a new edition of Seton Gordon’s 1927 book Days with the Golden Eagle. There had been nothing like it when it was first published, and it has not been bettered since. I cannot watch the flight of an eagle then try and write it down without being aware of his long, long shadow. My introduction to that new edition of 2003 began:

His second book about eagles (although they cropped up in almost all of his books) was The Golden Eagle, published in 1955. It is in that book that he relates the following story about Loch Ba:

In the posthumous edition of his book The Moor and the Loch, published in 1888, John Colquhoun of Luss tells us that, in the Blackmount Forest2, he was able to see, from the shore of Loch Ba, both golden eagle and sea eagle above their nesting territories. The golden eagle nested on a rock west of the loch, the sea eagle on the large island on Loch Ba. The golden eagle hunted on the high hills, the sea eagle over the low, boggy ground. Their hunting grounds being distinct, the two birds rarely met, but there were occasional clashes, in which the golden eagle always got the better of the sea eagle. Colquhoun lived in Victorian days, when a bird watcher did his best to secure a rare bird as a trophy: he attempted to shoot the sea eagles of Loch Ba, but was apparently unsuccessful. His story is valuable, because it shows that the sea eagle bred inland as well as on the coast. The Loch Ba eyrie was on a birch tree. As Colquhoun was being rowed out to the island, the sea eagle left her eyrie and perched on a neighbouring tree, “her white tail shining like the silver moon”.

The hunter landed, his companion made a “hide” for him (surely one of the first “hides” on record), a small aperture was made for his gun barrel, and for six hours he remained in his “hide”, his gun covering the eyrie. During this long watch the sea eagles usually floated at an immense height, but sometimes dived to the neighbourhood of the eyrie, beating their great wings which, he tells us, made a hoarse, growling noise like the paddles of a steamer heard at a distance on a calm day. On one occasion the eagle did indeed return to her eyrie, yet Colquhoun did not fire, and the reader has the feeling that he was half-reluctant to destroy her. At all events, after this long watch in the “hide” he did not return until the following year, and we are not told what happened then.

Seton Gordon’s story makes intriguing reading for a twenty-first century eagle-watcher. Many of those who object to the whole sea eagle reintroduction project cite disturbance to golden eagles up to and including taking over their nest sites, while cheerfully ignoring the essential truth that for ten thousand years since the Ice Age, golden eagle and sea eagle thrived side by side without any need for human intervention. Human intervention in the “management” of wildlife behaviour is the point at which things usually go wrong. John Colquhoun was writing at a time when overbearing management of all manner of bird and mammal predators had rendered many species extinct and brought others to within sight of extinction. Seton Gordon’s observation that Colquhoun was “half-reluctant to destroy her” is surely true: one of the reasons why the sea eagle succumbed to extinction while the golden eagle survived in the same landscape and exposed to the same attitudes and the same guns, is that the sea eagle was a much easier target, much larger and slower off the mark, and often given to nesting at ground level.

Loch Ba may be only a handful of miles from Loch Tulla, but its character is utterly different. If the decompression chamber of Glen Dochart prepares the traveller for the kind of new intensity in the landscape you can feel at Loch Tulla, Loch Ba evolves that transition further, and into something more wild, less controlled, less controllable for that matter. It is a singularly primitive place. It lies at an altitude of a thousand feet and is wide open to the tongue-lashings of every wind that was ever brewed in the imponderable space that is Rannoch Moor. It’s a loch that is hard to love.

Early April, and Loch Ba was still largely ice, an eerie pale blue-green-grey shade that was oddly compelling, a thing of glaciers. And for all that, it was surrounded on three sides that early spring by head-turning mountains dazzling in sun-light and deep snow, the loch was the most hypnotic facet of the landscape. In this mood, nowhere in Scotland (apart from the Cairngorms plateau, which is three thousand feet higher) looks and feels as Arctic as this. The transformation from Loch Tulla is astounding. The psychological impact on the traveller – that you have climbed to an Arctic realm – is supported by geological time. Loch Ba is where that inland-sea-like presence of Rannoch Moor washes up against the mountains of the Blackmount. Rannoch is the architect of all this, a one-time ice cap such as you can find today about six thousand feet up in the heart of Iceland. Its first consequence was to grind down and reshape every mountain in sight, while its glaciers whittled away the land into countless glens for many miles in every direction. When all that was done, the legacy of its passing was the greatest of all our native woods that swarmed across a strewment of rock and lochan and bog all the way to far Schiehallion. We – your species and mine – took care of the trees, though their bleached bones are everywhere in the peat. What we now call Rannoch Moor is the corpse of the Great Wood of Rannoch. These birch-and-pine-clad islands and outcrops demonstrate unambiguously that with human will and the reinstatement of something like natural forces (wolves, for example, so that the red deer hordes would remember how to behave like wild deer again), a Great Wood could flourish here again, and all nature – and all of us – would have cause to celebrate. This is a place of huge gestures. White-tailed eagles here? I should think so!

The birches on “the large island” in Loch Ba were in their weariest end-of-winter guise, and looked deceptively pale and frail, and tawny in the sunlight, but touched with that purplish winter mist that seems to cling to all birchwoods. Most of the trees look young and insubstantial but there is one hoary old relic at the heart of the island copse. I subtracted in my head: 2013 minus 1888 (when Colquhoun wrote his book) – one hundred and twenty-five years, which is much too old for a birch to survive in the best of conditions, but this is perhaps the grandchild of the sea eagle’s tree. But you need birches in a land as unforgiving as this one. Hugh Johnson, writing in his wondrous landmark of a book Trees (Mitchell Beazley 1973, Octopus 2010), describes birch as one of the hardiest of broadleaves, able to thrive even in the Arctic conditions of Greenland and Iceland, “…essentially nature’s stopgaps, quick-growing and short-lived, graceful rather than dignified. It is their nature to lean slightly from the true; their strength is in their wayward femininity…”

“Nature’s stopgaps” is perfect for describing these birchy clusters in this high latitude doing its passable impersonation of the Arctic on what Hugh Johnson would call “bare, often starved land” with its “extremes of drought or damp” – more damp than drought to be sure, but I walked across Rannoch Moor one long hot June day and night a few years ago and never saw anything in all Scotland so transformed by drought. The wolves would be the agents of more birches by transforming the behaviour of the grazing hordes, and sea eagles would be just one of the countless tribes to benefit. They would find Rannoch’s spaciousness to their liking too, and now that the osprey is already back at Loch Tulla, it is a matter of time before they drift this way too. If it works for ospreys, it will work for sea eagles.

As for Seton Gordon’s remark about Colquhoun seeing the golden eagle here, and that its nest was on a rock west of the loch, the “rock” in question is not hard to find today if you know what you are looking for, but on that icy early April day, I decided against the likelihood of seeing one. By April the eagle is usually on the nest, but only the south face was free of snow and golden eagles rarely use those. The rest of the “rock” was under deep snow and that is often enough to dissuade golden eagles from using their preferred eyrie site, or even to persuade them to abandon nesting for the year altogether. There is also the small matter of the disturbance offered up by the proximity of the West Highland Way with its footsore legions of gaudily clad walkers bowed down by packs the size of sea eagles and mostly looking at their feet.

Loch Tulla and Loch Ba require short diversions from the eagle highway in my mind, but diversions short and long are in the nature of sea eagles, and if the highway really does establish itself as a permanent trade route, then birds from east and west will find their way to the historic heartlands of their tribe simply because they are sea eagles and they will acquire the knowledge that leads the way.

2 The use of “forest” in this context refers to a “deer forest”, a bizarre Victorian phrase to describe estate land where trees had been removed to make it easier to shoot deer.