The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Sea eagle chick was a bird loaded with significance
IREACH OUT readily for symbolism in nature. When I thought that I had finished writing my book, The Eagle’s Way, it marked the culmination of two years of research and writing at the end of more than 30 years of watching eagles and wandering eagle country. But a week or so after I had written finis at the end of the manuscript, two things happened that compelled me to revisit it.
The first was the discovery last autumn of a newly fledged golden eagle in the company of its parents and in a troubled glen for eagles, a glen which, I was convinced (and I was not alone), had failed once again, and the second, was a radio report, a week later, in which the RSPB confirmed that a sea eagle chick had fledged from a nest in north Fife.
Because both these events came so close together and so soon after I thought I had finished what had proved to be my most exhilarating challenge as a writer, I reached out readily for symbolism. Why would I not?
A golden eagle hatched and fledged and flew unseen and unsuspected in the glen where looking for eagles had 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 theTay estuary, the first of all my landscapes.
The young golden eagle is the first to have emerged from the womb of that particular glen after seven barren years. The young sea eagle is more significant still. InThe Eagle’s Way I wrote its significance into a new epilogue:
“The young sea eagle is the first east coast native in 200 years and, given a fair wind, the harbinger of an east coast settlement, a bird loaded with significance and omen, for although more than 80 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 …”
That will teach me to write phrases like “given a fair wind”. For this is the very bird that has just been posted “missing” in Glen Buchat on Donside. The bird was fitted with a satellite tracking device while it was still in the nest and it was in Glen Buchat when the device suddenly stopped working. Suspicion was underpinned by the fact that Donside has form in this kind of endeavour. Four golden eagles have disappeared in the same way in the same area in the last five years, a state of affairs that prompted the RSPB’s head of investigations Ian Thomson to describe the grouse moors of upper Donside as “a black hole for eagles”. Other birds of prey have been poisoned there.
But there is something particularly odious about this sea eagle’s death. The whole sea eagle project began on Rum in 1975, so its endeavours have been sustained for almost 40 years now. This kind of endeavour and timescale has the capacity to make a real difference. And this was never a project that was conceived with a commercial or a political end or with some other spurious rationale of self-interest. It was conceived and it was implemented because it was the right thing to do.
Over the last two or three centuries, our forebears had become accustomed to taking from nature, to exploiting nature, and to removing from nature everything that was deemed to possess those qualities of that word we invented specifically for the purpose, one of the ugliest words in our language – vermin. Land use in Scotland, and especially in the Highlands, was perverted over time in pursuit of its two most self-indulgent inventions – the deer forest and the grouse moor. Everything that was remotely inconvenient for those ends was simply killed, and if necessary rendered extinct. In the 21st century, that mindset has yet to become extinct.
The return of the sea eagle is a visionary step forward in the process of attempting to turn that tide, the process of beginning to put things back, the process of returning to nature that which is nature’s. The project was wholly benevolent. The fruits of its labours included the first free-flying sea eagle in the east of Scotland for 200 years, and given a fair wind … but it was only given a year and it might have lived for 30.
In The Eagle’s Way I wrote in that added-on epilogue:
“…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.”
The most common question I have been asked at talks I’ve been giving about the book is how we stop the persecution of eagles. The answer I have given is that things will begin to change when a landowner is jailed. I have seen only nodding heads in response.