And a dead sea eagle fetched a good bounty. In Orkney, a hen from each house in the grateful parish was paid to the person who killed an erne. Ten shillings was the going rate on Skye. The bird’s parts had their uses too: apart from the fat which fishermen coveted, the sea eagle’s long broad wings would serve as a useful broom. On cleaning days, peering through an open doorway, women could be seen moving back and forth like injured birds, dragging a great broken wing across the room.
28 June 1914, North Roe, Shetland
The artist George Lodge is walking across the hills of North Roe with two companions and the watcher James Hay. It is a day of wind and wet mist that drives across the hill. They struggle to keep up with Hay, who moves like an antelope across the tussocks and deep moor grass. The party is making for the Red Banks where the last resident sea eagle in the British Isles can be found. Hay tells them that she is an albino specimen and has lived here going on thirty years. For a long time she was paired with a mate, but they bred for the last time in 1908 and shortly afterwards the male departed. Since then the female has lived out here on these cliffs alone.
They see her from a long way off, a white spot on the rocks below the old nest. As they approach she flies off and out across the bay and they do not see her again for the rest of that day. She looks as white as a gull when flying. Lodge makes an oil sketch of the nesting cliff. He works for an hour and a half but the weather is awful and after a while he is too cold and cramped to continue, so he packs up his easel and heads homeward.
30 June 1914
Very windy today. The party heads back out to the Red Banks in search of the sea eagle. She is nowhere in sight when they get there and it is too windy to paint, so Lodge makes a pencil sketch instead. The nest looks like a mass of rubbish and is hard to distinguish against the backdrop of rocks. He notices a hooded crow mobbing something round the corner of the cliff. His friends go to investigate and out flies the eagle pursued by several hoodies. He has a good view of her as she passes in front of him, notices that her primaries are not white but appear to be a light brown.
10 July 1922
Eight years later. Lodge is back on Shetland and making for the Red Banks to look for the albino sea eagle. Hay tells him that she has not been seen since 1918. On the way to the old nest site the route is blocked by a burn in spate and Lodge has to trek for two miles before he can cross it. Finally he finds a place to ford the burn and heads back downstream until he reaches the cliffs where he made the sketches in 1914. There is now not a trace of the old nest.
There is a rumour on Shetland that the eagle was shot in 1918, though no one knows what happened to the body. Lodge crouches down out of the wind and scans the cliff face. He cups his hands either side of his mouth and calls out to the cliffs, listens to the pause, the ricochet, the dissipating distorted echo:
Anyone there
Anyonyou
Anyonyou
After the sea eagle has gone the land feels emptier. All those place-names in the evicted landscape. Earnley (the wood of the erne); Arncliff (erne’s cliff); Creag na h-Iolaire (eagle’s rock); Cnoc na h-Iolaire (eagle’s hill). And after that lone white female is shot in Shetland in 1918 there are decades of emptiness. But then, in parallel with the osprey, the sea eagle starts to re-emerge into some of these emptied spaces. Young birds are brought over from Norway in the mid-1970s and carefully, painstakingly, reintroduced to Scotland’s coasts. Their numbers are still small and like all large birds of prey they are slow breeders (slow to reach breeding age, slow to rear their young and rarely raise more than two chicks per year). But sea eagles have returned and they are gradually spreading along these shores, reanimating the rocks and hills and woods that were named after them.
Besides my visits to Morvern I made trips to other places to look for sea eagles. Recently the birds have been reintroduced to Scotland’s east coast and I went to seek them there along the Tay estuary and made several midwinter visits to Loch Leven, where the eagles are sometimes drawn in cold weather by the large flocks of wildfowl that gather on the loch. Occasionally I caught distant glimpses of the eagles but always they were a long way off, crop-filled, static, sitting on a rock or at the top of a distant tree. It bothered me, my lack of any really good time spent watching the birds. I wanted very much to observe how they flew, to study their shape in flight, to watch them hunting. I had to try one more time. So I went back again to the West Highlands towards the end of June and this time focused on a small area further up the coast from Morvern where I spent several days watching the shoreline for sea eagles. I was so glad that I went back.
Early morning, looking down from the cliff at the narrow sound below. The tide is rising and the narrows are a frantic squall of whirlpools and standing waves. It looks like the sea is coming to the boil. A huge volume of water is being squeezed through the channel and the narrows bubble over under the pressure. The air is a cauldron of gulls, swirling above the rushing tide, feeding on the fish being pushed with the tide through the sound. Black-backs, herring gulls, common gulls, cormorants, the white wing-flash of a great skua, a lone gannet … There are dozens of seals too feeding amongst the gulls, snorting, slapping the water with their tails. The morning is so still I hear the seals huffing and whacking the surface long before I reach the cliff. And the noise of the seals is so loud at first I think it is being made by much larger beasts, as if a pod of whales were surfacing there. Some of the seals drift very close, slow black shapes through the clear water beneath the cliff. There are so many seals I could hop from one to the other like stepping stones across the narrows. In places where the tide is running fastest there are seal–gull skirmishes, thefts and squabbles in the thrashing water.
A slight rise in the noise from the gulls, like an increase in pitch of their agitation, and there is the sea eagle flying up the channel. He is following the shoreline, slow shallow wingbeats, but moving quickly. Brown and grey like a red deer’s winter coat. Long-fingered primaries fray his wing tips. The most striking thing about his flight silhouette is his long thick neck and the neck is elongated by his huge yellow bill. In flight he is not as outrageously large, nor as cumbersome, as I had expected. There is speed and agility there and he twists easily through the swirling cloud of gulls. His short tail seems to check his size in flight, it gives his shape a squatness (much as a buzzard’s tail does). So what you see is mostly wing and neck (unlike a hawk in flight where what you notice is the long narrow tail). It is when he is shadowing a herring gull, or being mobbed by a hooded crow, that the sea eagle comes into his scale. He swamps these smaller birds with his size and the great width of his vast, broad wings sinks home.
I am overjoyed to see him. After all those days spent walking around the coast of Morvern, sleeping out with Oronsay’s ghosts … A chance, at last, to spend some time watching – properly observing – a sea eagle. The conditions are perfect: clear and bright and the eagle appears to want to linger here, where the fishing is good. I have found a seat above the cliff, a mossy cushion amongst the heather where I can look down on the whole sweep of the narrows and scan the woods and rocks on either side.
The gulls have brought the eagle here. And it is the gulls that announce his arrival through the change in pitch of their squabbling. If I cannot locate the eagle I learn, over the coming days, to wait and listen out for the gulls’ signal that he is approaching. It is the gathering of the gulls as the tide starts to swell and push through the narrows that ushers in the sea eagle. He is here because he is an opportunist, a fisherman, a scavenger; he is here because of the gulls. The way the eagle interacts with the gulls – the dynamics of this relationship – is fascinating to watch and I am quickly caught up in the drama of it.
Most of the time the eagle is perched near the top of a young larch tree overlooking the sound. He sits up there and I sit opposite him on the other side of the narrows. What is most conspicuous when he is perched like this is his dun grey head and neck. I can also see his heavy yellow bill and ther
e is a flash of yellow a little further down where his talons lock around a branch of the tree. If I lose sight of him – if I have to rest my binoculars to clean the lenses or if a seal-slap below the cliff distracts me – I can usually pick the eagle up again on his perch by scanning the trees for the pale yellowy light his head and bill emit. I can see now why MacGillivray gave the sea eagle that peculiar Gaelic name, An Iular riamhach-bhuidhe-ghlas (the eagle brindled with yellow and grey). Those are the bird’s colours (the mature adult bird’s colours) precisely. He sits up there on the tree, very tall, his head and neck glowing faintly like a dim harbour light. His long wings folded and hanging down behind him make him taller, lengthen his back. The top of the young tree is bent under his weight.
Then he is up and has latched on to a gull. When he leaves his perch there is nothing awkward in the way he detaches his great bulk from the tree. He just steps off, huge wings outspread, launched at once into a low, fast glide across the water. Why does he select this particular gull? What is it about this gull that makes it stand out from all the others churning and squabbling over the narrows? There must be something that gives this gull away, a weakness, a vulnerability, a visible fish-bulge in its crop, something that signals to the eagle that it is time to leave its lookout perch and give chase.
What follows is a shadow dance. The eagle latches on to the gull and proceeds to follow it everywhere. His victim is an adult herring gull, a large bird in itself, but utterly dwarfed by the sea eagle’s heavy presence. The eagle does not attempt to attack the gull, simply looms over it like a dark cloud, stalks the gull for as long as it takes, staring down the gull, until the gull can take no more of this thing that is so large and overbearing that its wings block out the sun, locking the gull in a permanent shade.
When the gull finally relents I see it drop something, a tiny morsel of bright fish. And in an instant the sea eagle has shifted into something altogether else. It defies its bulk, its size, its ponderous, sluggish reputation and transforms itself into a bird I did not anticipate. The eagle twists into a burst of speed and swoops down after the gull’s spilled catch, but when the gull drops the fish, eagle and gull are too low above the water, and despite his sudden rush of speed there is not enough time for the eagle to intercept the fish. He sees that he will not reach it in time and already, before the fish has even hit the water, the eagle has given up, pulled out of his dive, and is beating back towards his pine-tree perch.
When I check again the eagle is up and flying across the narrows towards me. I sit very still watching him loom and grow through the binoculars. I have a fine view of his long neck and pale nape. He keeps coming straight towards me. I wasn’t expecting this … what is he doing coming so close? Surely he has seen me? At the last minute – whoosh – he banks upwards, above my head and lands on a rock on the hillside behind me. His head and the shouldered tops of his folded wings are silhouetted by the backdrop of blue sky above the hill. Straight away a hooded crow is swooping down at the eagle’s head, dive-bombing him repeatedly. Each time the hoodie swoops at him the eagle flinches, recoiling his long neck from the attack. It is the raptor’s curse, this relentless mobbing; gulls and corvids, especially, are the raptor’s bane. Mobbing is their way of saying: We can see you, we don’t fear you, we don’t want you here … The hoodie will not leave the eagle alone. The crow keeps on haranguing him until the eagle has had enough. And he is up again, flying back across the sound to find a quieter perch.
The next time I see him he is harassing a gull, breathing down its neck, following the gull’s every twist and turn. The gull does not show any hint of panic. It is unhurried by the eagle’s pursuit and does not try to shake the eagle off. They reach a sort of equilibrium, a resignation that the dance just needs to be seen through to the end when the gull must jettison its catch if it’s to get the weight of eagle off its back. So they go like this for five minutes until, at last, the gull spills its catch, and this time I see it is a large fish and I follow it as it falls through the air sparkling in the sun and watch it hit the water with a splash. The eagle flexes into speed and shoots after the falling fish but once again the drop-gap is too shallow and he does not have time to catch the fish before it hits the water. Once the fish is in the water the eagle makes no attempt to retrieve it.
The gulls are still here in numbers, working the narrows. The eagle sits on his pine perch watching them. When he is up amongst the gulls I notice how clean and bright his white tail is. It is very noticeable, this flash of white across the tail, whiter than the gulls themselves. Seven herons come croaking up the sound. After them, flying in the opposite direction, a small flock of guillemots, in tight formation, skimming the waves. When I turn back from the guillemots to the shore the eagle has gone from his perch. I look up and see he is climbing high above the sound. Two thousand, 2,500 feet … What is he doing up there so far from the gulls and the fishing? Then I see there is a gull up there with him, trying to outclimb him. The gull is just a speck. The eagle looks like the gull’s swollen shadow. For ten minutes they turn about each other in the high air. I keep my binoculars fixed on them waiting for the moment – there it is! – the fish is dropped and this time they are so high up and the fish has so far to fall, the eagle has all the time in the world to flick down in a sudden charge of speed and pluck the fish from the sky.
In the slack tide of the afternoon I walk over the hill behind the cliff. Taking my time, trying to refocus the scale of my gaze from the eagle to the small and near-at-hand. Meadow pipits and grasshopper warblers are out on the hill. Everywhere there is the rapid trilling sound of the warblers and the speckled breasts of the pipits. I meet a dragonfly on the path, as long as my hand, clinging to a thick blade of moor grass. The dragonfly is motionless, undeterred by my shadow. It does not even flicker when I kneel down beside it and place my camera just an inch away to photograph the bright yellow-black traffic-signal stripes along its abdomen.
On the other side of the hill I reach a deer-fenced forestry plantation. A pair of buzzards are calling and swirling above the trees. I follow the buzzards into the wood and find a track that starts to drop steeply down towards the sea. At the high point of the track I pause to scan the canopy for the buzzards again when a huge bird – nothing like a buzzard – flies across the clearing right in front of me. It is the sea eagle, circling just above me and so close that, if I were to climb this stumpy pine, I could reach up and feel the downdraught from his wingbeat. In a quarter of a mile I have gone from dragonfly to meadow pipit to buzzard to sea eagle, as if I were walking through layers of magnification.
I stand very still in the middle of the track and the eagle circles above me, low over the trees. He comes around in a wide arc and as he turns to face me he suddenly flinches and veers to the side, as if swerving to avoid me. He banks awkwardly into a different angle of flight. His huge wings push down under him and the wing tips almost touch each other beneath his body as he pushes and hauls himself away from me.
I saw the moment when he saw me. He was close enough for me to see his left eye as it clocked me standing in the middle of the track. In that instant, I saw how the shock of my shape triggered something in him and caused the sea eagle to flinch and reel away.
In the early evening I am back above the cliff to catch the rising tide. The gulls and seals are there working the narrows. I have not been there long when I hear that sudden shift in tempo from the scolding gulls, and there is the sea eagle beating up the channel. This time he is flying very low above the water, much lower than I had seen him in the morning. What strikes me, too, is the speed and line of his flight: he is heading straight for something. He rises a foot or two, still flying in the same direction, accelerates, then drops down again towards the water. His wings pull back behind him as if he is about to land, both feet push out in front of him and his talons brush the water scooping out a glint of fish. Then he is pulling up and away from the sea and this time gulls are mobbing him, rollicking around him, trying to tip the e
agle from his catch.
I keep my binoculars fixed on the eagle. The gulls are frantic around him, the noise of their calling has ratcheted up another level. They coil around the eagle as if trying to bind him in a giant knot. But the eagle seems oblivious, he sticks to his course, beating steadily away across the sound, and the gulls begin to dwindle in his wake. Once he has shaken off the gulls the eagle begins to circle over the lower slopes of the mountain. It looks as if he is hunting there, foraging over the ground, and I am puzzled: he has his fish, why is he not returning with it to the nest? Then I realise he is not foraging, he is climbing. He has been looking for a thermal to take him up the side of the mountain and very slowly he is spinning upwards, gaining height. If I drop my fix on him whilst he is flying against the mountain’s backdrop I find it hard to pick him up again, the mountain’s browns and greys fold the eagle into it. But once he clears the summit and his shape is set against the sky, he is the only black dot up there for miles and I can follow him easily as he keeps on rising. At around 4,000 feet he suddenly turns and shoots away to the south in a steady downwards glide. He has chosen the path of least resistance: once he has gained sufficient height it is a downhill glide and he can cover the distance back to the nest (which must be several miles away) in a matter of seconds.
What a wonderful thing to witness, the sea eagle taking a fish from the water like that. I thought the eagle would revert to harassing the gulls as he had during the morning shift. And it was as if he had spied that fish from a long way out, the way he stuck to such a straight course flying fast and low up the narrows. Here was a bird that kept dismantling my preconceptions of it. In an instant the sea eagle was capable of shifting into astonishing poise and speed and skill.
I am back on the cliff early the next morning. I do not want to miss a beat and I spend most of the rest of the day watching from my mossy seat above the cliff. In the late morning a large school of dolphins comes into the bay, gulls sprinkled above them, drawn by the fish the dolphins are herding. There are so many dolphins, the water churns around them as they travel, and there is such a ferment of gulls following the pod, it looks like a weather front is moving up the channel.
Raptors Page 10