He comes closer to the shore, drifting towards my seat on the dunes. I can see the black strip across his eyes. Head tilted downwards, reading the water. This time, when he dives, he is so close I hear the splash, a great cymbal crash of water and bird. I watch the talons go in and then come out again, clawing, empty: a miss. That grip! One fiftieth of a second is all it takes to clamp around the fish. The outer toe reversed so the fish is held in front and behind, clamped tight in the foot’s sandpaper vice.
A grip like that would surely lead to speculation, stories, myths … And sure enough there are fishermen’s tales of osprey skeletons found embedded in the back of fish too big to lift, fish who pulled the birds under, drowned them in the inky black.
There are stories too of young ospreys in the nest forced by their mother to gaze at the sun until the one that blinks first and weeps is dispatched, thrown out of the nest like some brutal Spartan ritual. And there are tales of fish turning their glistening bellies up, sacrificing themselves to the osprey as she cruises over their lake. For how else do you explain a bird so exemplary, so adept at plucking fish from out of the depths at will?
I watch him fall from a great height. Beneath him: a thimble-thin bay that fills and empties with grey, colloid water. At the last minute, before he enters the water, feet are flung forwards ahead of him. As he lines the fish up between his feet it looks as if his beak is reaching to touch the tip of his talons like somebody stretching to touch their toes. Then the splash! So close, this time, it almost wet me!
The turning point, the moment when ospreys returned to these shores to breed once more. When – how – did that occur? Some say they never completely disappeared, that a pair bred on in the quiet of the Caledonian forest. Gordon notes in his book In Search of Northern Birds that a pair of ospreys were seen beside a Highland loch in May 1938. One of the birds landed in a tree beside its mate with a fish, a good sign that they may have been nesting in the area, though Gordon is not so sure, suspecting the birds had simply paused a while on their migration to Scandinavia. And there were other sightings over the years, from Galloway to Ross-shire. An osprey was sometimes seen flying high over Loch Arkaig, one of the last places ospreys nested before they became extinct as a breeding species (1916 is regarded as the last year that ospreys bred successfully in Scotland, on Loch Loyne, Glen Garry). The few who knew of them kept their secret close, looked out for the birds each spring. Migrant birds were seen on passage to Scandinavia and small offerings must have been made to the gods by those who witnessed these migrations, willing the ospreys to rest a while longer, to stay. And in 1954 a pair did stay and raised two young from a Scots pine tree at the south end of Loch Garten. But word leaked out and in the following years the birds’ eggs were frequently stolen. The turning point came in 1959 when the RSPB took the decision – a brilliant, bold decision – to advertise the ospreys’ presence to the world. A public observation post was set up, telescopes trained on the nest. And visitors in their thousands streamed in to see the birds.
The burden of care for the ospreys became a public concern. The press reported the success or failure of breeding. Recolonisation was tentative, incrementally slow. By 1966 there were three osprey pairs in Scotland. Egg thieves still menaced, cutting through razor wire, climbing trees at night with the same determination as their forebear who had swum across the freezing loch with his stolen clutch. The thieves drastically hampered the progress of recolonisation, havocking the breeding season like a May gale. That awful journey, thousands of miles across the Sahara, the Bay of Biscay, for nothing. Once a nest had been robbed the ospreys would often build a ‘frustration’ nest somewhere nearby; too late in the season for rearing young, going through the motions, a grief nest. Volunteers monitored nest sites around the clock, number plates of suspicious cars were reported to the police. Some of the thieves were caught, some scared off. In 2000 a detachment of Marine Commandos dug themselves in for the night around an eyrie that had been repeatedly robbed. The following morning the Marines ambushed two thieves prospecting beneath the nest and marched them away to the police.
Egg theft is waning now, though not extinct. Custodial sentences, cultural shifts have seen to this. And ospreys are returning and returning; over 200 pairs breeding in Scotland and reaching, spreading out to England and to Wales, returning to their place-names in the landscape.
After the devastating storm of 1694, the sands that had covered Culbin continued to shift. Things that had been buried were suddenly revealed again. The chapel and the dovecot appeared like mirages adrift on the dunes before the sands shook and covered them once more. Trees emerged thinner, their trunks tapered where the sand had moved around them. On one occasion a chimney from the manor house peeked up out of a dune like a periscope. Whoever it was who came across the chimney there did what anyone else would have done, they clambered up the stoss, the windward slope of the dune, peered into the dark mouth of the flue and called out a greeting, Hello down there … Whatever it was that called back at them from the bowels of the great house was surely more than just an echo. Otherwise, why did the man flee, terrified, careering down the side of the dune in a cascade of avalanches, the dune falling after him, repairing itself, smoothing over, as quickly as the man’s tumbling descent gashed at the sand.
And once, or so the story goes, the tops of the laird’s old orchard were revealed. And the trees blossomed so the sand became a quilt of pink and white. And in the autumn there were apples strewn across the dunes as if a game of billiards had been abandoned there.
I stayed in Culbin forest for two days and nights. In the forest I met treecreepers, tiny wren-sized birds, bibbed white, scratching up the pine trunks. I met a hare who lolloped past my tent one morning as I sat outside brewing tea. The hare turned to look at me but did not pause or alter its pace, just carried on threading its way through the forest understory. I met, as well, a roe deer hind, lustrous copper coat like a new two pence coin, grazing amongst the pine interstices, moving slowly through pools of shade. I sat very still and watched her until she almost grazed me. At the last minute scenting me, seeing me, springing, leaping away, stopping after 20 feet to turn and snort and stamp her foot.
On the north shore of the forest I met the most beautifully patterned rocks I have ever seen, as if the bedrock of the firth had been flensed and then spilt from inside it stones that had gestated for millennia. I wanted to pocket some of the rocks and take them home but they were so jewel-like and exquisite, so intricately textured, it felt like a theft to disturb them.
I heard among the trees a moaning, thinking it must be the wind in the tops. But then heard it again drifting off a sandbank and turned and saw sixty grey seals hauled up on a beach between the bay and the sea. Greys and whites and blues, skin patterned like barnacle-covered hulls, sighing, singing, wailing above the noise of the breakers.
And in between there was always the osprey. A noise like an intake of breath above my head and there he was coming in off the forest into the glare of the bay. Once I found him hovering high above the trees, so high up and so far away from the water I did not think he was hunting. But then a pause, a fracture in the hover, and he dropped into the narrow channel that links the bay with the firth. Splash! He rose with a fish grasped in his talons, the head of the fish facing the direction of flight, reducing wind resistance; a slight curvature, as if the fish was turning its head, where the talons gripped it.
Iasgair (the fisher); Iolair-Iasgair (the fisher eagle); Iolaire an uisge (the eagle of the water) … The osprey has also been called the ‘mullet hawk’ as, in Scotland, grey mullet are so often taken by the birds. But in addition to mullet any fish that hunt or swim near the surface can be predated by ospreys: pike, carp, bream, trout, grilse, roach and perch … In their tropical West African wintering grounds the variety of fish taken must be extensive.
Sometimes the osprey called as he flew, skimming over the treetops above me. Chee-yup, chee-yup: the first note, chee, long and slow. I looked up th
rough the trees and there he was, directly above me, gliding over the rim of the forest, his white breast a drifting moon, a spotlight passing over me as I shrank down among the pine roots.
Often I found him between elements: on the cusp of the forest and the sea; coming out of a dive, ascending from the water back into the air. And I found myself drawn to these margins, looking for him there, poking about the shallows of the bay or sitting on the edge of the forest where the pines had lost their footing and fallen, like the man fleeing the ghostly echo, down the face of the dunes.
The lull of the afternoon, watching the tide glut the bay. No sign of the osprey. A distant clicking through the trees: another pine cone falling, skittering down through layers of branches. But the noise is persistent, nearly rhythmic. I crawl to the edge of the dune leaving a spoor of myself trailing through the reindeer lichen. The shoreline is a waxy yellow colour, bright with gorse flowers. Bare-footed, I feel the sharp bite of wood ants objecting to my toes. I roll away from their nest and peer down from the dune. Bloody ants! My feet are stinging from their bites … In amongst the wrack two hooded crows are lifting shellfish a few feet into the air then dropping the shells onto the rocks to crack them open. The crows barely break into flight, more a hoist, a ballet-lift, then hover, release: crack.
Sometimes crows called me out of the trees, their cauldron-croak more noisy than usual. I would go to stand on the edge of the forest and there would be the osprey coming in off the bay again. The crows rising towards him, a buffeting escort.
In poor light above the murky bay I watch the osprey hanging in columns of air. Astonished by how high he is above the water, mesmerised by his flickering hover. I stay with him through the long evening. The tide begins to slip. The patterns in the mud look like the bumps and grooves, the gyri and sulci, of a cortex.
They planted ten million trees across the dunes to try to stabilise the coast, fixing the sand with a thatch of brash to stop the young trees from being smothered. Still, some were smothered and some trees have half their height buried underground. As the brash rotted it formed a layer of humus, but it is a thin layer and only an inch down my finger finds cool black sand.
One evening I walk through the forest to its northern edge and lie down in the marram grass overlooking the firth. Spread out across the tidal flats are long poles sticking up out of the mud. They look like the remnants of a forest, a ghost forest, overwhelmed by the sea. Gulls perch on the top of the poles like lit bulbs. Later I discover the poles were erected during the war to frustrate enemy gliders from landing in a feared invasion from occupied Norway. I wonder why they have never been removed, but they do not seem out of place in this place of verticals, where a church steeple can suddenly emerge out of the sands, shellfish and pine cones fall and crack, ospreys tilt and dive.
Charles St John, the Victorian collector who shot the osprey near its nest in north-west Sutherland, recalls an incident when he was fishing on a bright summer’s evening on the river Findhorn. St John describes hearing a sound like the rushing of a coming wind. Yet it was a still evening with barely a breeze and so he shrugs the noise off and continues to fish. A few minutes later he notices that the slack water he is standing in is suddenly sweeping against his feet. He turns to look upstream and sees the terrifying sight of the river rushing towards him in a perpendicular wall of water, or like a wave of the sea, with a roaring noise, and carrying with it trees with their branches and roots entire, large lumps of unbroken bank, and every kind of mountain debris. There has been a downpour in the Monadhliath mountains some hours, perhaps days, ago and now the legacy of all that rain is about to hit him. St John has just enough time to grab his fishing gear and run for his life, scrambling up to the safety of a rock above the flood.
That sand can behave like this too, that it can be as destructive as water, that it can flood and ruin like water, is hard to grasp. Yet sand has its own fluidity and can shape and mould objects as water can. Charles St John observed that the stones which the Findhorn rolled down from the mountains to the river’s lower reaches were as rounded and water-worn in their appearance as the shingle on the sea shore. The trees planted at Culbin which were submerged by the shifting sands emerged again thinner, their trunks tapered where the sand had moved around them. One traveller describes being out in Culbin during a sandstorm, a pressure of weight on his body dragging him down, as if gravity had been increased, his pockets, shoes, clothes, eyes, nose … filled, saturated with sand. Sand pours from his clothes like water, he is nearly washed away.
Even the mighty river Findhorn is forced by the sand to change its course. One year the mouth of the river is blocked by such a mound of sand the Findhorn has to shift itself to find another way through to the sea. Birch trees, like snow poles marking a buried road, still line the route of the old river. In the forest, pools of water appear each winter along the course of the extinct Findhorn, remembering it, as if the forest almost dreamt the river back to life.
V
Sea Eagle
Morvern Peninsula
The shepherd brings MacGillivray a sea eagle he has shot. The day before, the shepherd had dragged the carcass of a horse up to the spot where, as a boy, MacGillivray tethered his uncle’s white hen to a post and lay in wait with his gun. The horse is all ribs and strips of tattered skin. There is a drag-line across the moor where the weight of the horse has dented the heather clouds. The ribcage perched on the brow of the hill like that looks as if a boat is being built up there. You would not know the hide the shepherd conceals himself in from all the other heaps of stones. And if you glimpsed, from a distance, the shepherd busy about the carcass, charging his gun, then disappearing inside the pile of rocks, you might have thought you’d seen a ghost up there, or spied the entrance to some fairy broch.
It is a fine specimen the shepherd brings him. MacGillivray starts to skin the eagle’s head and feet. Its skin is covered in long soft down. Haliaeetus albicilla; White-tailed Eagle; Sea Eagle; Cinereous Eagle; Erne; Iolaire chladaich (the shore eagle); Iolaire suile-na-grein (the eagle with the sunlit eye). MacGillivray gives it the name An Iular riamhach-bhuidhe-ghlas, with his idiosyncratic Gaelic spelling, which at times has thrown me off the scent trying to follow him through the Gaelic place-names in his journal. And for several hours I find myself struggling to translate this name, picking over The Essential Gaelic–English, English–Gaelic Dictionary, trying to navigate MacGillivray’s spelling … The best I can do with the translation: ‘the eagle with the yellow-grey markings’, or ‘eagle brindled with yellow and grey’. Unless what the shepherd has actually brought MacGillivray is that other species of eagle, that unknown fugitive eagle of the Harris hills, and this was MacGillivray bestowing on the bird its Gaelic name.
I have begun to lean on William MacGillivray more than I ever thought I would. If I find myself grounded, my journey on hold, held up by work and family and everything else that must come first, if I find myself away from the birds for too long, I’ve learnt to rely on MacGillivray, his journals, his books, especially his first book, Descriptions of the Rapacious Birds of Great Britain, which I carry everywhere, heavy as a brick inside my backpack. And if I become lost, if, as often happens, I cannot for the life of me think how I’m going to find these birds, I’ve learnt that it’s best to revert to MacGillivray, to his writing. And there’s always something there – in him – that gets me going again, keeps me heading back out there to search for the birds.
One evening, as I drove home from work, a buzzard slipped from a squat winter hedge in front of my car. I flinched. The bird was huge and close, filling the windscreen, rushing towards me. I was sure I was going to hit it. But at the last minute the buzzard tilted, flipped up, skimmed over the top of the car, cleared the adjacent hedge and dropped down into the field beyond. I see buzzards almost daily along that stretch of road but they had never brushed so close to my car. What would I have done if I had hit the bird? Pulled over, picked it up? But then, what could I have done with its body
? I could not just discard a bird so beautiful. And as I drove on I thought of MacGillivray as a boy dumping the golden eagle he had shot on the village dungheap. And only a few years on from that and birds had entered his life, come to possess him, so much so that he cannot relate to his younger self, cannot think what possessed him to discard the eagle. And now the shepherd is bringing MacGillivray this dead sea eagle because he – MacGillivray – has sent out word that he is looking for specimens to study and before he knows it he seems to have become the depository for all the dead raptors in Scotland. He wants to study these specimens because he wants to understand how the birds work and because, above all, he wants to find a new way – a more accurate way – of describing and identifying birds.
All those hours spent sifting through the dead. His desk lit with the bit parts of eagles, oesophagus, stomach, intestines … For, it must be obvious, MacGillivray wrote,
that a bird is not merely a skin stuck over with feathers, as some persons seem to think it, but an organised being, having various complex organs and faculties, the description of all of which is necessary to complete its history.
So the eagle’s stomach is no less important than its bill. And this is what distinguishes MacGillivray’s work as an ornithologist, his attention to this detail, his insistence on studying and describing every aspect of the bird. And in this way he advocates a new way of seeing the birds, of looking at them so intently that when he is watching a sea eagle perched like a sentinel on the great sands at Luskentyre, he looks beyond its white-fanned tail, the huge, heavy bill, into the pulse and texture of its form, to draw an extraordinary word map of the bird:
Raptors Page 8