January 1st 2008

When the tide’s at its lowest, it’s possible to walk straight out on the sea bed, north along the Black Sea-Ford for half a mile towards the island & small skerries in the South Channel. With no mark of a footprint on the sand except for the tracings the various sea vegetables make as they are swung back & round by the ebb tide. These vary from circles to what looks like a small child’s drawing of a three eyed elliptical alien, but is only an impression drawn by the sea of bladderwrack. Otherwise, no curlew has passed this way, no oystercatcher. Sometimes a stag or hind will pass here, but it’s a little soft today & they’re elsewhere in the hills grazing, sleeping, at this hour before dusk. It’s just ten days since solstice & already there’s a little more light in the mornings & even more noticeably in the evening, when the day is extended by about half an hour.

I head for the promontory of the MacNeill, across from the promontory of the Dividing, though of what I’ve no notion, unless it’s one set of broken skerries & mud sand flats, one set of salt flats & shoals & yet others to the west; though perhaps also defines the bounds of land-use & tenancy. It’s along from Port Ban & I want to walk as far out into the sea as it’s possible to get without a dinghy. The promontory when I reach it is sodden with the rains. Not just the past week or month, but of the centuries. Itself a rock into the channel, from whose bed it rises up, cracked & worn by sand-laden wind, in its twisting & walking & weatherings it has developed hollows in which water lies, covered by sphagnums rotting into what, given greater depth & another thousand years could become peat.

Skirting the deepest moss hags, given away by the red moss growing patchily among the green & yellow rising sphagnum, & sticking to the bare rock & the few patches of soft rush which give a firm foothold, I crest the slight rise to look out to the open sea, at this point uncluttered beyond the shoreline of tumbled rocks & rounded tide blackened boulders. & there, at this point where no one goes from one year’s end to the next, a silhouette against the glare of the ocean surface, is a man knee deep in waders, I guess fishing.

As I stand wondering whether to abandon the walk & make for the eastern headland after all, he slowly swivels his head & reveals the massive curve of an eagle’s beak. The sun had fooled me, along with the glare & conditioning of my kind to see human figures in the landscape. But there’s no doubt about it & a hesitant step or two carefully avoiding any more of the skyline shows me this cracked & unvisited landscape is hers, not mine.

Her three foot height is also bulky enough to have fooled me, but stood on top of a low boulder facing the sea she appears much taller. A heron swings away to the north & to the east a noisy pack of oystercatchers chatters by, piping their grumbles to the world. She’s still as I am, unmoved, focussed, her profile still to the west. I hold my breath, move closer, but even above the noise of the cold wind she has heard my squelchings & scrabbling on rock, & her head swivels a little further & I’m caught in that crisp & cogent stare. Without a word, I’m as apologetic as I would be having disturbed any new year angler; but she doesn’t trust me & I’m far too close at less than thirty feet, & she rises slightly, spreads her wings, which are so huge, I feel they would umbrella the distance between us, & takes off in a single flap & a long glide towards the big island north. She reveals a white tail & I take a breath as I realise what I should have known all along from her size – she’s a sea eagle. She dwarfs the skinny heron still making across the channel & is over, I think before I draw breath again, to disappear among rocks her own colour.

I sit, exhilarated; take a swig of malt from the flask in wonder & elation, & the seals edge together slightly. Throughout the drama, for it can best be called that: the facing of eagle & man, the seals have been as unnoticed as any other rocks, not fidgeting as they often do, silent, dozing. But the tension’s ended, & something has changed for them in the charged air & they yawn themselves awake & then back to sleep.

Frances Pitt, writing in 1946 saw the last nesting place of the sea eagle in Britain, the west cliffs of North Roe in Shetland. A pair nested there every year until 1908, when a local farmer shot the male. The female, a partial albino, returned each spring until 1918, after which she was seen no more. In 1947, Frank Fraser Darling writes of the sea eagle & its disappearance from Mull, Jura, Eigg, Skye, & the Shiants: “It is all a dismal story; and it is a matter for doubt whether, should these species try again to colonize this country, they would be allowed to breed in security. The vested interests of game preservation (by no means dead in a Socialist Britain), of a decrepit sheep-farming industry, in the West Highlands and Islands, the pressure of egg collectors and irresponsible gunners, are heavy odds.”

Not only are the vested interests of game preservation still strong, but they have seen off the attempt at a “socialist Britain”. Sheep farmers have changed however. My neighbours here, the man & woman of the croft were as pleased to see a sea eagle as I would have been, & it standing by the phone box at the road junction where no houses are for a quarter mile in any direction. Maybe it was expecting a call from Rum, which lies seven miles offshore, & where sea eagles were reintroduced in 1975, breeding from 1985. They’ve grown in numbers, though they are slow breeders, & spread a little in the past twenty three years, but there’s still only about two hundred individuals across the Small Isles, Mull & hereabouts.