SO I REACHED OUT effortlessly for symbolism. Why would I not? A golden eagle hatched and fledged and flew unseen and unsuspected in the glen where looking for eagles has been a routine for half my life. And a sea eagle hatched and fledged and flew from an east coast woodland deep within the force-field of the Tay estuary, the first of all my landscapes. Both of these flights happened the same week that I had written finis at the end of this book’s manuscript. There are times in the nature writing life when nature appears to tap you on the shoulder, and you do well to pay attention.
The young golden eagle is the first to have emerged from the womb of that glen after seven barren years, and the first offspring of the beautiful pale eagle which has become my mind’s eye’s definition of all her tribe, despite all the eagles that have crossed my path from Sutherland and St Kilda to the hills of home and the hills of Galloway. The young sea eagle is the first east coast native in two hundred years and, given a fair wind, the harbinger of an east coast settlement, a bird loaded with significance and omen, for although more than eighty birds have been brought from Norway to fly free over east coast skies the enterprise is without substance until native birds establish themselves and evolve their own way of life into which more and more generations are born. If the enterprise had failed, if all the Norwegian-born east coast arrivals had ultimately tended westwards, the eagle highway would also surely have failed for want of new blood from the east. A few birds from the west might still have occupied the historic inland haunts between Loch Awe and Rannoch, but the impetus to travel east beyond the Highlands would not survive without the pull of an east coast population. All the ecological riches that are bound to flow back and forth from coast-to-coast travel and settlement would be lost – riches we can only guess at yet, in much the same way that no one anticipated the beautifully benevolent extent of wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone when that enterprise began. The scale may be different, and Scotland is, alas, still some distance away from putting wolves back into Rannoch, but the principle of repairing a systematically raided ecosystem by installing new native blood at the top of the food chain is one that cannot fail. That, and the restoration and expansion of every native habitat is all the help nature needs to recreate something of an older, wilder order.
The first thing we will learn is that the golden eagle will not be impoverished if and when – almost certainly “when” – it is outnumbered by the sea eagle. For that is Scotland’s historical norm, and it is the situation in Norway today where there are several thousand pairs of sea eagles and a much smaller but thriving population of golden eagles. And mostly, the two eagle tribes co-exist amicably enough. In occasional one-to-one skirmishes, usually a territorial dispute, I have never seen and never heard of a sea eagle prevailing. The golden eagle is the supreme flier as well as the supreme predator of our skies, and that alone should be enough to guarantee the stability of Scotland’s golden eagle presence. Inferior numbers will not change that.
A wise man, a grizzly bear guide on Kodiak Island, Alaska, once told me: “The only way to get to know a creature is to live with it.” We were speaking in his cabin on a tiny island in the middle of a lake on Kodiak where I had found moulted bald eagle feathers by his doorstep, and the subject under discussion was living with bears, with wolves, with eagles. He was experienced and adept at sharing the landscape with all of these. He was the one who convinced me by his own example that we learn about and understand other creatures only by living with them, not by taking the word of the loud mouths and small minds of those vested interests who would shout us down and have us believe that Scotland cannot accommodate those creatures their predecessors cleared from the land. Scotland can. The land can and the people can. We learn by living with them. We make adjustments and so do they.
Most of us think of ourselves as living apart from nature, but the other creatures of nature think of us as a part of nature. They see us as powerful and unpredictable, sometimes lethal and sometimes generous, a serious presence in the land and at times a formidable predator. So where they live close to us, or when we take a long walk to where they live, they make adjustments to our presence. That is the way it has always been. New wolves, new bears, new eagles will behave the same way. That is how it should be.
If the sea eagle really takes hold in the east, many more people will start to see them regularly, the people and the eagles will be fixtures in each other’s landscape. We learn about them by living with them. They learn about us by living with us. In the same way, the two eagle tribes learned to live that way with each other many, many thousands of years ago.
So what’s next? I honestly don’t know. And neither does anyone else. What I do know is that I want to be there when it happens. I can still hardly believe my luck at what has begun to evolve before my nature writer’s eyes, for the eagle’s way just happens to be my way too. Whatever unfolds, it will never be less than instructive, never less than spectacular, never less than wild. If I were you, I’d watch. And oh, the glory of the watching!