Under the Yellow Mountain

Warm winds filled the hopeful wings

of limbering-up apprentice swallows

on the corner of south Mull nearest Africa

as September ebbed and dipped

a toe in autumn’s imminent flow,

and going-nowhere eagles leaned

on the same benevolent winds

to tilt the Yellow Mountain.

Come April, come the same

Africa-and-back swallows, time-served

on big game plains, not cold rains

and sodden sheep; they perched again

on the same old south Mull fence

and saw the same old eagles

still tilting the Yellow Mountain.

NOWHERE IN ALL SCOTLAND embraces, emblazons, proclaims, promotes, exploits and generally brags about its eagles quite like the Isle of Mull. I like to board the island by the side door, by way of the Corran Ferry a few miles south of Fort William to Ardgour, then the rugged drive among the hills and oakwoods of Morven to the precipitous coastal village of Lochaline, which is surely the most consistently and foully mispronounced place name in the Highlands. (It is not the teeth-grinding, grimace-inducing Lock-a-line or even Lock-a-leen but rather the sigh-like Loch-aah-lin, with long-vowelled emphasis on the second syllable and the last syllable having virtually no vowel sound at all. There is no charge for this service.) From Lochaline then, the ferry trundles thoughtfully across the Sound of Mull to Fishnish, a little nowhere on Mull’s east coast with a slipway, an unpretentious café to cater for the patient occupants of the steady dribble of queuing vehicles; that and a great many unwelcoming Forestry Commission trees – although sea eagles rather like such plantations for nesting. But Salen is only five miles up the road with good coffee, a good shop, and a post office where a staff sweatshirt announces: “Isle of Mull – Where Eagles Fly”. Just along the road a sign proclaims: “Sea Eagle Bookings, 200 yards”. I have been on the island for about ten minutes.

Sea eagles have done this. It was on Mull – in 1983 – that two birds from the Rum reintroduction project first nested, and – in 1985 – reared their first chick. A far-sighted conservation strategy established not just protection for the birds but also nationwide publicity. You cannot hide birds this size with a tendency towards very public behaviour, nor nests that can grow over a few seasons to more than twenty feet wide, so you may as well shout about it. A visitor hide with a big screen and a camera on the nest were installed, a convoy system was introduced to conduct visitors’ cars from the road end (the nest site was mercifully in a plantation forest, which permitted a discreet approach through dense spruce to the hide), and – crucially – an island-wide campaign was launched that swung the islanders behind the conservation effort and recruited hundreds of pairs of eyes to help to counter the worst intentions of inevitable egg-and-chick thieves. All that was allied to a tourism initiative that openly welcomed eagle-watchers, and is now worth several million pounds a year to the island economy. Mull’s eagle population has become something of a golden goose.

Before the sea eagles came, Mull was still one of the best places to watch golden eagles and a range of wildlife, from otters and dolphins to deer and basking sharks and a breathtaking list of bird species, but no one was shouting about it. Now, the boat trips are the visible tip of an iceberg that hoves to on tourism’s sea every spring. A particular species of visitor decants from cars and campervans at selected spots around the island where they set up tripods for telescopes and cameras with lenses the size of baseball bats. They know where all the sea eagle nests are, and where the eagle boats go and sit out on the water with their engines cut, and try to lure the sea eagles down from their cliff edges or their tree perches. The landlubbers crowded around the tripods are based beneath the flightpaths the birds use fairly reliably between their favourite perches and the familiar boat with its familiar cargo of dead fish, the skipper’s practised patter, and more people with cameras with baseball bat lenses but no tripods.

The composite message of all that is unambiguous: eagles are good for you. I am slightly uneasy about its evangelical edge, and when I go to Mull to watch eagles and much else besides, I’m on a different mission. I don’t need photographs. I try and find what I’m looking for far from roads and tripod clusters and boats bearing gifts of dead fish. But that’s just me. I work with what George Mackay Brown called “the scrutiny of silence”. One of the joys of Mull is that it is accommodating enough for all of us, and I begrudge no one a single moment of the pleasures to be found in collective birdwatching, nor do I begrudge the islanders a penny of the spoils. As a public relations exercise on behalf of nature and people, it has a lot to recommend it, and there is room to spare on many a quiet headland for the solace seekers, the scrutineers of silence.

Mull has had longer than anywhere else in Scotland to tune in to the behaviour patterns of a resident sea eagle population. But around the now improbably distant Tay estuary, where there is no tradition in living or even historical memory of the presence of sea eagles, the natives have not known what to make of the untutored juveniles in their midst, and now that some of these have grown to adulthood and the full glory of the bird is apparent for the first time, I sense a softening of attitudes, a quickening interest, and that these have begun to redress the imbalance of widespread suspicion and outright hostility. On Skye, there are boat trips, there is an eagle-watch visitor centre at Portree (where I first learned years ago now and with some astonishment that gannets were a regular item on the sea eagle menu!), but there is nothing like Mull’s well-mobilised goodwill-to-all-eagles campaign. Perhaps Skye still thinks of itself as a golden eagle island, and there are certainly parts of the island where crofters still air grievances about sea eagle behaviour. In Torridon, where fifty-eight birds were released between 1993 and 1998, some of the crofters’ outrage has ancient echoes of badmouthing wolves. It became the new scapegoat on the block for every real or imaginary felony against sheep, with the occasional, and apparently inevitable warning about threats to children. Stories of eagles taking babies from the fields while the corn was being cut are as old and far-flung and ubiquitous as stories of wolves being thwarted from their meal of babies by heroic hunters. It is the same thing exactly, with the same amount of truth to it, exactly. Who would have thought that the sheep, shorthand symbol for the Highland Clearances, would become a twenty-first century sacred cow used to deride the repatriation of an exterminated native bird whose presence in the landscape predates the coming of the first people, a bird ultimately exterminated by the same Victorian philosophy that also exterminated hundreds of Highland communities; that a little over a hundred years later, the people would find common cause with the sheep rather than the restored eagle?

The Treshnish Isles, endlessly recomposing motif of the west coast of Mull, are confusing from Haunn, confusing because the island-watcher views their ocean-going convoy from dead astern so that their slabby profiles overlap and merge into an amorphous island porridge. A late afternoon of mid-April, the sun blazes off the ocean in a yellow-white dazzle. The south-west wind has been building for a day and a half, and all afternoon shore-bound waves have advanced to its raucous tune. They form up in a restless queue off Haunn’s battered shore of geos, caves, stacks, holed and broken headlands. A hundred yards out, the waves are ten feet high, ominously green and muscular. They rise in concave scoops then curve forward to envelop their own internal architecture in long tunnels. The architecture of waves is rarely revealed. Their nature is impermanence, temporary and rolling evolution followed at once by extinction, but that evolution establishes shapes, patterns, structures, of which the rolling tunnel is but one. I think of Frank Gehry. He could stand here and see buildings in the surf. His first sketches often look to me like breaking waves. Nature has been the source of much great art forever, and Frank Gehry’s architecture is great art.

Now, even as the waves pile in, I can feel the wind begin to falter towards high tide, then as it slowly abates, the surge of warmth from the sun. The biggest waves break fifty yards out, charge the shore in snow-avalanche surges. White horses – who ever came up with that image knew a thing or two about waves. The people who lived here (their roofless townships are everywhere along this shore, just above the raised beach) were cleared, like the eagles, and left for Canada, New Zealand, wherever, with the sound of the white horses in their heads and their hearts.

The unfurling of huge waves, the unfurling of huge wings, the casual deployment of raw power that breaks rocks, that breaks bones: Mull has a quality, a limitless capacity for grand gestures, a landscape worthy of eagles. It is, I concede, a poet’s rather than a naturalist’s response to the scene before me, but then I never claimed to be a naturalist.

The naturalist may be intrigued and breathlessly excited as the sea eagle tries to find its feet on the Tay estuary, but the poet may feel a tinge of disappointment that not every Tay-fledged bird has made an instinctive beeline for Mull, for a land-and-sea-scape that works for eagles. Yet some do. The first east coast bird to breed did so on Mull. Torridon birds have bred on Mull, abandoning the mountains, lochs, pinewoods and angry crofters of the north-west Highlands and bypassing the possibilities of Skye’s eagle stronghold in the process. Even Skye birds have bred on Mull. And Mull itself has become a hub that radiates eagles to every compass point. It is almost as if the sea eagles have recognised not just the island’s qualities but also (given their willingness to watch the people at close quarters) the islanders’ determination to do the best they can for “their” eagles, and in the process, to make the most of what they quickly realised is their good fortune to have been chosen by nature to participate in a daring new adventure to which their island is uncommonly well suited.

Meanwhile, the road sign at Salen had done its job well. “Sea Eagle Bookings 200 Yards.” Days later its message was still niggling in the back of my mind and sometimes in the front of it. There is no tougher nut to crack in the matter of wild-life-encounters-by-invitation than I am. As I have indicated, I am a bit of a purist in these things, “aloner than thou” as a reviewer of one of my books memorably put it. Long before I began to write about it all for a living, I was a self-taught disciple of what Tom Weir called “the joy of discovery”. You learn from your mentors and peers of course, but you do your own fieldwork, you go and meet nature on its terms and reach your own conclusions. That way, the knowledge you acquire has authenticity and you can trust it utterly, and it is worth much, much more than anything you cobble together from Internet sites, guidebooks, and… yes, the gimme-your-money-and-I’ll-show-you-eagles school of ecotourism. But these very eagles were a part of the story of the book I was writing, so surely the boats that were a fact of their lives were part of the story too. And apart from that, I just wondered what it would be like.

Besides, I have form. The BBC’s Natural History Unit once paid me to go on a whale-watching boat in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and a few days later to stand – with a professional guide – twenty paces from an adult grizzly bear on Kodiak Island, and these had provided two of the most enduringly meaningful moments of my writing life. But on my native heath I tend to work the heath in native solitude.

I had seen the films and photographs that the eagle boats made possible by way of the low-tech expedient of motoring in to within a few hundred yards of one of those known coastal sea eagle perches, attracting a small blizzard of gulls with thrown chunks of cheap white bread and rolls, thus catching the distant eagle eye, then throwing a fish overboard. The theory is that then the fisher-eagle flies, hell-bent on the day’s easiest meal, while the decibel level rises on the boat and gasps litter the air as thick as gull cries and an eight-or-nine-foot wingspan fills the frame of camera screens and viewfinders.

And perhaps, as it flies off with its prize, its yellow-gold eye will seek out yours in a passing moment of timeless intimacy and an old, old connection will slip into place and change your life. Perhaps. It happened to me in Alaska when that humpback whale’s four-inch-wide eyeball slid past the boat a few feet below me looking up, and I felt chosen. So, I would discover, did everyone else on the boat. And it happened again on Kodiak when a grizzly sow with cubs broke off from salmon fishing to advance towards me and I asked the guide what she was doing.

“Just taking a look.”

“At us?”

“No. At you. She knows what I look like.”

So now there was a roadside sign at Salen and I began to wonder about it, remembering Alaska, wondering what it might be like. I wondered what happens to the people, and to me, and to the eagle when it volunteers to mix it up with the species that wiped its ancestors from the face of the island, from the Atlantic seaboard, from the face of the land. So I bought a ticket.

The skipper was a jovial cove with apparently inexhaustible supplies of jokes, banter, bread and fish, and with very good birdwatching eyes. The male eagle had been “in great form all week, really putting on a show, no reason to think today will be different, and let’s hope you’ll have a day to remember all your life”.

Naturally, he added a professional disclaimer:

“But remember these are wild birds and I don’t have a rope I can pull to call them in.” Now why would he say a thing like that?

He said he thought the male recognises the boat, and even the sound of its engine, knows the routine.

The morning had been sprinkled with magic dust. The sea was the blue of alpine gentians, all but flat, and littered with winking diamonds of sunlight. It grew warm and windless. There was high snow on the summits and ridges of Ben More and the other high hills, just enough to confer an air of alpine distinction on them. The west coast of Mull in this mood may be the most beautiful place on earth. Suddenly what we were about to do seemed ridiculous in the face of so much beauty. For some reason I thought (for the first time in about forty years) of Lillian Beckwith and what she might have made of ecotourism, the preposterous idea of a boat full of tourists being so easily persuaded to part with their money so that a man in a boat would take them to see eagles. Maybe see eagles.

So our little group sailed out with high good humour and higher expectations. Eventually we nosed gently into the head of a sea loch and cut the engine. Silence roared in. Two red-throated divers sat unperturbed on the water not thirty yards away. We already had a retinue of gulls thanks to some thrown bread. The skipper announced that the male sea eagle was exactly where he had expected it to be, and identified a smudge on a distant conifer. The longer lenses on the boat had a speculative look, but even in good binoculars the bird looked like a bit of a dead branch.

We waited. We watched. The bird’s slightest movement was announced out loud by any of us, by all of us, a lifted foot to clean its beak was met with an “ooh”, a half-open wing raised a louder murmur, a shuffle along a branch almost a shout. It was getting tense.

A fish went overboard. Two big black-backs disputed ownership and fifty lesser gulls complained. The divers edged closer towards the fringes of the melee, looking for scraps. The eagle stayed put.

An hour passed, a singularly agreeable hour, what with the weather, the setting, the birds. Up in the big conifer, stupor had broken out. We ate sandwiches, drank coffee, waited. The skipper was philosophical and apologetic by turns, threw more fish, created more gull mayhem, all of which the eagle in the tree ignored. One of the divers took off with a runway of about a hundred yards, flew in a low arc that brought it round on a collision course with the boat, but it climbed at the last moment and hurdled the boat not ten feet over my head. I heard my own gasp. What was that all about?

I turned back to the ship’s company to share my delight, but they were all looking the other way.

“It’s flying!”

It was indeed. The boat galvanised. The biggest lenses were trained, primed to follow every yard of its approach to the boat, another fish went overboard, another undignified scrap among the gulls, and in the mind’s eye of all of us at that moment was the prospect of a sea eagle gatecrashing the throng to snatch the fish from under their screaming noses.

The sea eagle was coming our way, eventually. But first, and to the collective dismay of the ship’s company, it began to circle, and as it circled it climbed, and as it climbed its already distant profile grew smaller and smaller. Finally, once it had put five or six hundred feet of airspace between itself and the sea, it levelled out and headed south out across the loch and it did fly directly over the boat and over the not-quite-long-enough lenses.

Oh, but there was something god-like in its passage! I see it in my mind’s eye to this day, a single indelible image, the bird brilliantly lit against a royal blue sky, its white tail “shining like the silver moon” in John Colquhoun’s unsurpassable phrase, and those wings at their mightiest outreach – God, what wings! The bird was cruising, the wings moving to a slow and shallow pulse and held intermittently in brief glides, and it was headed for the hills that cluster like acolytes around Ben More, the Great One. And if you had the sensibilities towards the natural world around you of, say, the tomb builders of South Ronaldsay, and you were accustomed to seeing such a sight on a daily basis, knowing that the same bird would come down to your level, lift a hare from your rough field or a fish from the bay where you fished yourself… why would you not make a god out of such a creature? Why would you not invite such a creature to participate in your sacred rituals following the death of your kin and your friends?

That’s what occurred to me, standing in a small boat on a flat-calm sea loch one mid-April day. It was the last thing I expected to feel, but it means rather more to me than if the bird had come down and taken a thrown fish in front of the cameras.

And that was it. Except that half an hour later the bird came back, higher over the boat if anything and followed by a second eagle which may well have been escorting it from the premises of the territory of a second pair where it had just trespassed. That, at least, was my best guess.

Two other things strike me now about that day. One is obvious and salutary: the recognition that you cannot orchestrate nature, that wildness by definition means unpredictability, driven by impulses that are different from those of our own species that turned its back on wildness. The other is that no one complained. No one felt short-changed, no one was dissatisfied, no one objected to being outwitted by an eagle, to being a bit-part player in an eagle game. “Game” is the wrong word of course, for it implies intent on the eagle’s part, whereas its behaviour was almost certainly down to the fact that it wasn’t hungry enough when we showed up. But watching it cross the loch and refusing the lure of our very obvious boat with its obvious gifts, a game is what it felt like. Yet the laughter and chat on the way back were evidence enough that we had all won, we had all taken something positive out of the game.

An eagle that conjured god-like presence, a red-throated diver that flew over my head, the west coast of Mull in such a mood… the skipper was right, a day I would remember for the rest of my life. I thanked him for the roadside sign at Salen.

There were strange sequels to my brush with ecotourism. The very next day, walking the shore at Haunn where I have walked dozens of times over perhaps thirty years, I was stopped in my tracks by a rock I had never noticed before. It may just have been that the light was particularly good, or that the state of the tide revealed the whole rock in all its aquiline glory, but I found it hard to believe that I had never given it a second glance before. It’s not as if it is inconspicuous. It is perhaps forty feet high, perhaps sixty feet across at its widest point, and in my eagle-crammed mindset, it resembled nothing so much as a sea eagle standing erect with its wings half open. The rock was black above a very obvious high tide line where its “feet” might have stood, and below that, the rocks that were accustomed to being underwater for half the day were a pale grey. The contrast heightened the impression of a monumental eagle set on a plinth.

It could be, of course, that I saw it in such a light because the boat trip was still so fresh a memory and because this particular visit to Mull was part of the process of nailing my theory about the eagle highway into place. But even now as I write, a year after the event, the photographs I took and the crude drawing I made are completely convincing: a massive representation of an eagle, sculpted by nature on the shore of the island that is my idea of the highway’s destination. How could I possibly have missed it before?

Then, a few hours later, there was an encounter with a young shepherd who was helping out with the lambing for the local farmer. He is an affable young man I had met before, a fifth generation Mull shepherd with a keen eye and a good feeling for the land of his ancestors. The conversation came round to the wildlife he lived with on a daily basis. He said he liked birds particularly, but not the sea eagle. There were too many of them now, the change was too fast, and they were killing all the wildlife. He said there were no hares now, and that sea eagles kill the swans’ cygnets and the protected seals out on Colonsay. His accounts were based on circumstantial evidence and anecdote, but he was clear that such instances were widespread and frequent, and that the net effect was profoundly negative. His was the first disapproving voice that I had heard on the island. He would not hear a word against golden eagles, but the sea eagle project had gone too far.

The next evening in the pub I got talking to a couple of islanders. They had moved up from Lincolnshire three years before and seemed to me to have taken to island life with an infectious zeal you don’t always find among what the natives call “white settlers”. Once again, the subject of eagles came up. They lived in a tiny community in the north of the island and went into raptures about how they could watch two sea eagles from their bed! They also described to me at length and with the same rapturous expressions and gestures the sight of three sea eagles, a golden eagle and buzzard riding the same thermal at the same time.

A loud-voiced couple with London accents had made our conversation difficult at times, and the odd phrase that drifted across provoked knowing looks from the eagle-worshippers. The London gent had been briefly eavesdropping, it seemed, for he suddenly leaned across and said:

“I saw an eagle today!”

The Lincolnshire-lady-turned-islander smiled appreciatively and responded:

“Golden or white-tailed?”

“Pass,” said the Londoner. “It was sat on a telegraph pole.”

Then he dived headlong into his sticky toffee pudding with butterscotch sauce.

The relationship between people of all kinds and the eagles of Mull of both kinds is a complex one. What has made the difference in the time that I have known the island is the impact of sea eagles. My first visits to Mull more or less coincided with the first sea eagles’ arrival on Rum. It would be years before I started to see them. But I registered quickly and with delight that Mull was the best place I knew to see golden eagles, and I quickly learned a handful of good places to walk and be still and expect to see them in the course of a day. I never had a conversation with an islander about golden eagles unless I brought up the subject myself, which I rarely did. The few responses I can remember were either that the islanders in question had never seen a golden eagle or else there was a quiet, almost instinctive reverence for the bird expressed in words that suggested it inhabited, as one old man told me, “that other Mull”. But thanks to the sea eagles and their habits of intruding on the everyday lives of the natives, and thanks to the tourist promotion, and thanks to the islanders’ widespread embrace of every aspect of an “eagle economy” (I have heard the expression several times), now everyone I talk to seems to have an opinion or a story about the place of eagles in island life. Mull, as never before, is an eagle destination, and in a Scotland-wide or for that matter Britain-wide context, an eagle destination unlike any other. It is as true for the eagles as it is for the people.

An old September, a dozen years ago now, a self-catering cottage in the early evening far out on the Treshnish headland of Mull’s north-west corner, the door wide open while a meal was being prepared, a dram poured, the day mulled over.

The sounds of the island drifted in through the open door, the birds that constantly came around the house or drifted across the hill at the back and the headland at the front, sheep on the hill, cattle in the rough fields, wind, and a strange and barely audible high-pitched and feeble yelp like a terrier pup that had just pricked its nose on its first thistle. It was a sound at the edge of my hearing, but it stopped the early evening in its tracks. I switched off everything and went to the door, dram in hand. The terrier voice sounded again but there was nothing to see, not yet. I waited. I know that voice. Then, one by one, three golden eagles appeared round the hillside, no more than a hundred feet up, the first one noticeably more compact than the others – the adult male; the middle one particularly large and dark – the adult female; the third one lagging behind a bit and the one that was doing the talking while showing some fallibility navigating the thermals and cross-winds around the corner of the hill – that was the year’s youngster, newly fledged and learning the ropes of flying from the past masters of the art, the birds that can land flying backwards, the birds that can play in choreographed overlapping vertical circles flying backwards at the top of each climb, the birds that can reach upwards of a hundred miles an hour just by half-folding their wings and angling down into a shallow glide, the birds that can hunt a foot above the ground at a hair above stalling speed, the birds that can snatch a tormenting crow from the air with a fast spin and an upwards strike from an upside-down position.

All these I have seen for myself. All these, plus the bird that was being mobbed by two ravens up behind the Glen Dochart cottage, and which struck one of them in the air so violently that it fell to the ground and dived down after the second bird and caught it in the air, then landed to pick up the first bird, and rose – much more slowly – for the three-mile journey back up the hill and over the watershed to the eyrie with a raven in each talon.

Such was the pool of expertise at the disposal of the young golden eagle with the terrier yap as it beat through the turbulent air round a Mull hillside, following its parents past the end of a hill track and over the roofs of three small cottages. They crossed the rough fields beyond, and headed out towards the blunt thrust of a headland to the north, and the yellowing sunlight of a September evening burnished their golden tints and made something immortal out of them as they passed, something symbolic that stood for all the eagles of all time. Ah, you had to be there.

An old April, early in my Mull years (spring and autumn soon became my preferred island-going seasons), wandering through the blunt innards of the island’s north-west, where a gap in the hills revealed a far glimpse of Staffa. I have always loved to sit where I can see Staffa.

These are strange looking hills to mainland eyes, volcanically rounded and rising steeply to small flat plateau summits. The profiles of the hills skip down in tiers, each one flat and right-angled. The faces of the hills are banded by low cliffs, some only a few feet high, the biggest no more than fifty feet. They look like ragged barrels, and in their midst I stumbled on a hidden arena, like half a coliseum where the cliffs are carved across a curving headwall in four distinct leaps, the cliffs separated by level terraces hundreds of yards long and up to fifty yards wide, nature as architect. I found the place at all because I was lured there by eagles.

I was alone and dawdling over an empty single-track hill road. I had seen no one all morning, so I was driving at birdwatching speed, and looking for somewhere to leave the car that wasn’t a layby and didn’t involve crossing a ditch. It was a four-wheel drive car but not the kind that can cross ditches. The day was grey, the hill-grasses were that bleached shade of no colour at all that they acquire by the fag-end of a long wet and windy winter. The forecast suggested brightness later. I was equipped for a long day out based on the presumption that the forecast was wrong. I found a piece of dryish ground where the car could be abandoned, got out, looked around, scoured the hills, the sky and the middle distance with binoculars, and it was there – in the middle distance as usual – that I latched on to a golden eagle. That makes it sound easy. The searching had involved half a shivering hour of stillness, which is not as easy as it sounds, but the difficulties can be mitigated by choosing your time and place and trying not to look out of place.

The eagle was juvenile (it had white underwing patches) and probably male (my guess, based on its comparatively compact size). It may sound a preposterous idea to follow an eagle into the hills, especially hills you don’t know, and in expectation of finding other eagles, a kill, even an eyrie – although there are very specific and stringent laws about how close you can approach one of those, and about disturbing nesting birds. (Besides, as I have already indicated, I have a pretty good idea what happens at a nest, but I am constantly astounded by what happens out on the birds’ territory, and that is what sustains me, intrigues me, and sustains my writer’s instincts.) But many years ago, as a hopelessly romantically motivated teenager, I read a book by Lea McNally about his time in Torridon, and about following an eagle into the hills. So I knew it was possible. It was just a matter of developing a technique I could rely on. From the point at which I read the book until the point at which I had developed such a technique, about thirty years had passed. If you want to understand golden eagles, you have to be in it for the long haul.

So I marked the bird’s line of flight as carefully as I could until it disappeared over the lowest edge of one of those rounded hills, donned boots, jacket, rucksack with a day’s rations, enough clothing to cope with a return to midwinter conditions and a small hipflask for ceremonial toasts to eagles or whatever else seemed appropriate. I slung the glasses round my neck, and picked up my stick. The stick is my eagle-watcher’s secret weapon, made from cherry wood with a small deer-antler ‘V’-shaped grip, the perfect low-tech combination of third human leg and a monopod for resting binoculars and occasionally a camera. And for leaning on for what my father would have called “a wee rest”.

An hour later, I had seen nothing at all, but I had climbed an unpromising looking rise in the ground and found myself in the “wings” of the coliseum, so I sat and watched the landscape instead, to see what might rub off. The level floor of the arena was the size of a large field and was wall-to-wall bog. Beyond, the land seemed to spring backwards and upwards in four leaps to the skyline, the terraces and the leaps cut by waterfalls. Yet it was not a rocky place. The same winter-weary grass covered almost everything, blotched with dark brown withered heather and defeated bracken. No vestige of spring growth yet, not here, but after a while of sitting and looking and listening there were suddenly golden plovers calling and meadow pipits falling cock-tailed and singing down ramps of cold wet air. A knot of about a dozen red deer hinds watched me from the skyline.

Stillness in such a place rarely goes unrewarded if your senses and your mind are as busy as your body is still, and if your stillness is complemented by clothes that blend with your surroundings. Wildness is often what you make of it, but it is rarely orange.

The day drifted into afternoon, I sat on, watched my way through a slow, late lunch, and realised that it was snowing lightly. It is surprising (at least it surprises me!) how often a weather event stimulates some aspect of nature that has been still or hidden. Five minutes into the snowfall, a rock two hundred yards away and fifty feet higher up the hill suddenly changed shape. It changed because (I now realised) the golden eagle that had been sitting there for who knows how long, betrayed itself by vigorously ruffling its feathers to free them of snow then reassembling itself into an eagle shape. Then it flew. It executed a single low circuit of the coliseum, presumably for momentum and lift, then launched itself into a fast, steep climbing corkscrew such as I had never seen before (and have never seen since), but which was worth the admission price on its own. These days, I incline towards the idea that there is a high degree of individuality among golden eagles, and that in terms of the huge repertoire of powers of flight at their disposal, individual birds show a particular preference for individual techniques. My erstwhile friend and eagle authority Mike Tomkies wrote it memorably in his best-known book, A Last Wild Place (Jonathan Cape, 1996):

A secret of aerial mastery no other bird possessed was perhaps what I had just witnessed. Mike Holliday’s reversing pair in Glen Ample was perhaps another manifestation. The more you take the time and trouble to wander out into landscapes like these, the more you will learn and the more you will marvel at what can unfold when a golden eagle puts its mind to it. On a clear day, the event would have been magical enough, but this thin gauze of snow conferred something arty and surreal on the moment, for a watery sun was now conspiring with the snow so that the light was filtered and sprayed all across the corrie, something like the way street lights splinter in fog. The eerie effect conferred a flimsy, ephemeral air on the landscape so that the eagle was the only thing of substance in my world, and all the more miraculous for that.

The purpose of the climb (if not the technique) was suddenly revealed – two more eagles, much higher, perhaps as much as a thousand feet, one substantially larger than the other, the mood apparently combative. I watched with the naked eye rather than the binoculars to keep all three in sight at once, and binoculars are not at their most useful in falling snow. The spectacle drew me in, my mood transformed from relaxed to heart-in-mouth. The cork-screwing eagle climbed far out into the mouth of the corrie, then spun from the apex of the climb into the wind and attacked. (“Great wings angled back like fangs” – perfect!)

The other two eagles had tumbled down the sky and were now much lower than the new attacker, whose fast glide turned into a free-fall aimed pointedly at the smaller bird. The falling bird pulled out as the target bird dodged, but it only pulled out into a stupendous upward swoop of about five hundred feet, flipped over and fell again. But now there was no target, for it had fled far across the island at formidable speed, and suddenly there were only two eagles in the sky, and these formed up wingtip-to-wingtip and disappeared round the end of the coliseum in gentle, level flight, leaving me ever so slightly breathless.

I reconstructed the incident as follows. Somewhere nearby there was an eyrie. The eagle on the rock was the resident male. Of the two higher birds, the larger one was his mate, roused to repel the attentions of an intruding male, the young bird I had first seen from the car, then followed into the hills. The bird on the rock had responded to his mate’s alarm, although how that was transmitted is the business of eagles and quite beyond me.

I had watched the whole thing through the snow veil. I shivered and stood, and set out to explore the coliseum’s ridges and tiers. The sun re-emerged, the snow faded and fizzled out, and a new and glittering clarity drenched my portion of Mull. I climbed first to a watershed where bare patches of dark and cindery volcanic rock looked like transplanted scraps of Iceland. A stone I picked up felt much too light for its bulk, porous and burned out by its volcanic origins, and dumped there to be stumbled over by deer and sheep, shadowed by eagles and fingered by my passing hand. The wind hammered up the headwall, as loud as it was cold, with ice in its breath. Its lulls were filled with new snow flurries. I was now level with the highest tier of the headwall, and rather than plod on through the wind to the succession of small skyline summits, I cut along the level terrace and found it magically shielded from the wind, and suddenly the walking was idyllic. For I turned and saw the islands and the fast squalls that tore among them, snatching them from sight one at a time then reinstating them as they raced on. And then, where I had paused to examine a tumbledown of boulders that lay heaped on a gentle slope, I lifted my eyes again and saw Staffa snared in the arc of a rainbow.

There would come a grey day in the far north-west of the island when I walked a clifftop in a wet north-westerly gale, a day when one more grey rock among thousands of rocks caught the nature writer’s eye because there was something not right about it, so it demanded a second glance. The wind was thrusting moist gusts over the clifftop from below: you could almost see the air burst apart into upwardly mobile columns, then fold over as they cleared the cliff edge, then go dancing away across the wide tilting plateau of the land, scattering mayhem in madcap polkas. I felt almost stupidly invigorated in the face of so much supercharged weather, half-inclined to dance myself, which (as those who know me well will confirm) is a singularly improbable circumstance. But then, advancing to where I could see low-tide rocks far below, there was that one awkward rock, awkward in the way that it related to the thousands of others.

So I raised my binoculars, flicking the rain-guard from the eyepieces in the same movement, and of course the lenses were pockmarked with raindrops at once. Yet through that gauze of glass and water, I could still make out the sideways and upwards twist of the head, the suddenly revealed billhook beak, and the upward-canted eye that took in my newly arrived shape silhouetted on the skyline. Then I saw the head twist the other way, twist so far round that although I was looking at the right side of the bird, I was suddenly being scrutinised by the left eye. Then the whole body of the “awkward rock” heaved in the same twisting motion as the head had done, so that the whole bird now faced into the wind and in that same moment became hugely airborne, an effort of such a brute mass of wings to convey the bird into the air. I thought again how a golden eagle would have done it, how in the same circumstances it would have stepped up onto the air and found lift with perhaps a single upstroke then half a downstroke that locked into a level glide with wings horizontal and still, how it would pass by and vanish. And I knew in the same moment that the sea eagle, though temporarily hidden by the cliff, would be coming my way.

Moments later, it appeared above the cliff edge and fifty yards to my left, facing towards me but drifting sideways over the land led by its starboard wingtip, although “tip” implies something altogether too tightly controlled for that colossal over-provision of over-sized primary feathers that cluster so thickly around the business end of sea eagle wings. I have held one such feather in my hand (at an organised RSPB talk: it was long-discarded by its original owner and was being used by the speaker as a prop). It was the length of my hand and forearm. I swatted the air with it, felt the air rock against my other hand.

Then the eagle stopped its sideways drift and came straight towards me, and was directly overhead and about fifty feet up when it held almost dead still against the wind, then it eased forward again and slowly began to circle the clifftop, watching, assessing, making pointed eye-contact. The sky, like the land, like the ocean, like the day, was unrelieved grey, and against that the bird looked black. It was a young bird so there was no white tail to relieve the bulk of the immense silhouette. I have been very fortunate to see many eagles in many circumstances and in several countries, and never found them less than admirable, never less than thrilling, and whenever I tried to write them down I was conscious of a particular desire to do them justice. This sea eagle, which any decent field guide would probably categorise as “immature”, was so confident in its edge-of-the-land world that it navigated the turmoil of that ocean-going wind among the cliffs, effecting the 200-foot climb to emerge at the cliff edge within two yards of the outermost thrust of rock, so intimate with the wind that it could pilot itself sideways under perfect control then gently propel itself forward, using the wind – instructing the wind it seemed – to position itself on the pinpoint of air directly over my head, and I refuse to believe that the manoeuvre had any purpose at all other than to create an unforgettable impression. No one standing where I was standing that grey and turbulent morning could possibly fail to be convinced of the rightness of that bird in that landscape. There was no sound. There hardly ever is. There were no tricks, no flying stunts, there was just the unambiguous possession of the air, the land, the edge of the ocean, and a lingering impression in the back of my mind of being in the presence of something as eternal as the rock itself, as the ocean itself, as the very air it could command to do its bidding. Was it a moment (or many moments) like this, I wonder, that persuaded the earliest Orcadians to engage with these extraordinary neighbours, an engagement memorialised for us to marvel at five thousand years later on South Ronaldsay?

The eagle beat away out over the sea at an angle to the wind, and I watched it until it was too small to follow with my eyes (the binoculars were now less than helpful). If it held that course, it would be on Skye in minutes.

Skye!

Of course!

When the first of the reintroduced sea eagles began to fan out from Rum, both Mull and Skye evolved more or less simultaneously into breeding strongholds. Forty years later that status is more secure than ever. My eagle highway envisaged a destination on Mull, a journey’s end for east coast birds. But what then? More will undoubtedly breed on Mull, but not all of them. So if not Mull, where next? En route to Mull from the east they have probably encountered Mull birds already, and as far east as Loch Tulla, Glen Orchy, Loch Awe, Loch Etive, all of them on journeys of their own across the country. Some of those east coast birds must sooner or later adopt the practices of birds from this long-established community of the west. So that also means wheeling away from Mull, perhaps with today’s young island birds, to travel far up and down the west coast – to Kintyre, to Islay, Ardnamurchan, Skye, Torridon.

“Or Mingulay,” I mutter to myself aloud, remembering that first rock that looked not quite right among so many others and became the first of all my sea eagles. But I have now crossed the country from east to west and back again many times, finding eagles or stories of eagles all along the way, and it suddenly occurred to me on that grey headland of north Mull that there is no end to the eagle highway. I could spend another year, another decade, wandering the western seaboard, and from time to time my path would cross that of wandering eagles and established eagles, and I could learn from that, slowly and over time.

But I have a history with Skye, which is longer than the entire sea eagle project, a history well populated with eagles for that matter, eagles of both tribes. I could let Skye symbolise for me all the eagles furth of Mull along the entire length of Scotland’s sunset-facing, island-strewn, Norway-like coast, one last flight of fancy along the highway. I stared out along the course of the gale-deflecting bird, which had so recently paused in the sky just above my head, circled the clifftop, and then (the notion suddenly entered my head and I accepted it gratefully) pointed the way forward. I would go back to Skye.