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Some time back in the early 1980’s, a huge and unfamiliar shape started to drift across the breeze from the Isle of Rum, and into the sky above the forests and glens of northern Mull. With a two and a half metre wingspan and the profile of a ‘flying barn door’, the white-tailed sea eagle was back after an absence of three-quarters of a century.

Sea eagles have hunted and scavenged alongside man since the Neolithic times, and they soon found plenty on Mull to keep them there. Over the next five years or so, various failed attempts were made to breed, and it wasn’t until 1985 that a female called Blondie successfully fledged a chick, which then became the beneficiary of an island that suddenly understood the enormous potential value of this gift from the north and which was determined to protect their eagles. Egg collecting was still a real threat, before the risk of huge fines and possible prison sentences began slowly to restrict it to a small and viciously determined minority, so a species protection officer was appointed, and a police operation set up that led inexorably to the Mull Eagle Watch, which continues in the breeding season to this day. This was and is a community that understands the value of its wildlife, and specifically its sea eagles.

Eagle economics: from carnage to cash

As their territories grew in number to 20 and more, so too did the opportunities to attract nature tourists and their cash. When I had been a regular visitor to the island as a boy, there seemed to be a sense of inevitable decline and lack of opportunity about the place that was reflected in a static population of around 2,000 people, and relatively few young people choosing to stay to work. Not any more there isn’t. These days, the population is nearer 3,000, and there are north of 100 wildlife and tour businesses operating there, ferrying people to see otters, (themselves beneficiaries of the protection and the banning of DDT), puffins, minke whales and much else besides. There has been a radical change from the 19th century, when ‘eagle economics’ basically meant rich people coming over to shoot them, rather than now, when it is all about the natural history, the fleeting glimpse, and the camera.

Above all, the camera.

Ewan Miles, a wildlife guide, has seen many changes even over the relatively short time he has been here and is acutely aware of the battle lines that can get drawn, often artificially, between conservationists, farmers, fishermen and others over any number of issues. ‘Bracken control for one’, he says. ‘Deer management, sheep grazing, disturbance, marine protection areas, creel fishers pointing fingers at the eagles and, above all, the issue of eagles and lambs’. It may be a living, but Ewan sees his team as part of an environmental movement, where the lesson that nature is our life support system can be drummed gently into each guest. ‘The trick is not simply to get as close as you possibly can to something just so that your guest can get the best photo, but rather to allow them to live in the moment whilst they watch something from a respectful distance.’ There is a deep sense in what he says of nature’s unexpected vulnerability in the

Instagram age, but also of the importance of getting the central message across to people before it is too late. He is convinced that the two are not incompatible.

‘Each person we share this with will potentially become a better ambassador for wildlife,’ he says. ‘The trick is to keep them at a respectful distance.’

The following afternoon, I get a boat to the little island of Lunga, a childhood favourite of mine, to see once again the colonies of breeding seabirds there. There is only one show in town for the majority of visitors, the charismatic puffins who nest in burrows on a ledge above the makeshift harbour. As a denatured people, we generally want our nature cute, ‘charismatic’ is the technical term, which is why the puffin delights so many. It is always shocking to see how close people routinely go to the birds to get the money shot. I watch one lady armed with an enormous camera wriggle her way to within a metre of a bird, blocking it from accessing the chick in its burrow, and another, a middle-aged man, posing with a glass and a little bottle of whisky at the entrance to a burrow that a puffin is patiently trying to access. Unwilling though I am to cause discord, I remonstrate with the latter, as it is so manifestly wrong. Stuart Gibson, who has been a volunteer wildlife guide on these trips for 20 years, is in no doubt of the wider danger of this behaviour.

‘When the white-tails came back,’ he says, as the two of us watch the puffin watchers watching the puffins, ‘they were responsible for putting cars on ferries, heads on hotel pillows and bums on restaurant seats. It has put the island on the map again, and given it a purpose.’

‘But now I think we are in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden egg,’ he adds. ‘The puffins here can probably cope with it, but when you have people blocking an otter’s access up to its holt so that they can get a good face-on-whiskers-in-focus picture, or getting so close to an eagle’s nest that both parents take to the air, you really start to fear for the future. Proper wildlife photographers go to the ends of the earth not to cause disturbance, and so should everyone else. At the moment, they are applying their first world rights to nature, and there is a risk that the place ends up like Serengeti, with five groups of tourists looking at the one otter from five different directions.’

Later, I ask Conor Ryan, a renowned expert on baleen whales and cetaceans who also doubles as a volunteer marine guide, whether the endless parade of whale-watching boats poses any risk to the animals themselves.

‘It’s the balance of probabilities,’ he says. ‘More tours going further afield in much bigger, faster and louder boats are more likely to strike whales and, in the long term, persuade them to move away, and effectively be excluded from their own habitat.’

For now, the warming seas are having far more effect on the cetaceans than a few thousand visitors do, as the conveyor belt of the food system heads slowly and inexorably north. Conor acknowledges the power of the exposure to wildlife in changing behaviours. ‘One child, one adult even, seeing an orca for the first time in their lives could change them forever, and positively.’

What worries him is the pace at which tourism is developing, with photographs and a tick list of species replacing the lived experience of raw nature. Where our forebears were content to watch and wait, for days on end if that is what it took, social media has led to our modern dopamine neurotransmitters needing all of it, and right now. ‘They used to come here for one week, maybe two. But now it tends to be two or three days and then head off to the next highlight somewhere else.’ In these fast-paced, adrenalin-fuelled days of instant gratification, even a place with the treasures of Mull has to fight for a few days’ attention, and maybe that factor is really what is behind the tensions. These days, nature is an uneasy branch of the entertainment industry.

Humans are animals, too. Obviously.

The nature of Mull has created between 100-160 full-time jobs on an island that badly needs them, and it brings in about £8 million of local income annually. It is a genie that is not going to be shoved back into the bottle, and nor should it, but the time may be approaching when a more enforced code of practice has to be put in place.

The eagles have changed the human ecosystem as well, not least on ‘affordable’ housing. With an average house price of £255,000, this is a real issue: when my Mull grandmother died in 1986, her comfortable three-bedroom home with a decent sized garden sold for a fraction over £10,000. These days, the current figure is only just below the UK average. Add that to an absentee house ownership rate of around 35%, and it is scarcely surprising that the very people who are needed to fuel the economy, currently struggle to find somewhere even to lay their head. Whilst some Muileachs may resent economic changes that have failed to bring equivalent changes to incomes, second homeowners also create jobs for tradespeople, and may well be local themselves.

Probably the biggest issue is the dire state of the ferry service, for which Caledonian MacBrayne famously has the monopoly. For people who have not spent time around the Western Isles, it is hard to imagine to what extent normality depends on the smooth-working of the ferry network that connects the twenty-three islands. Reliable ferries are the lifeblood of island communities. Ferries are the daily inhalation and exhalation of people and goods that keep the show on the road, the artery that keeps them connected to the rest of Scotland. It has been anything but reliable in recent years and many boats that are simply not fit for purpose. For the visiting tourist it is an annoying enough inconvenience, but for, say, a local livestock haulier or a cancer patient with an appointment to keep on the mainland, it is far more serious.

Talking to locals, it would help if more of the thousands of people arriving in camper vans to see those eagles at least shopped on the island, rather than the mainland, and spread the wealth that way. You get the feeling that what is really needed is a lot more decision making delegated to the islanders.

Every story needs a villain

I go to sea again to seek out more white-tails, this time in the company of Dave Sexton, who has championed them for just about every one of the 38 years they have been here. We have talked eagles together many times before, but this time I just want to ask him about the elephant in the eyrie, the reputation of the bird as a voracious killer of lambs, for it is this that is the seemingly unbridgeable divide between farming and conservation.

‘No one denies that can happen,’ he says, ‘or that there are real human costs, but there is also a basic ecological misunderstanding and unforgivable misrepresentation about how the eagles hunt and feed. The vast majority have a very varied natural diet of seabirds, fish and mammals, and they do not seek out lambs. They will sit for five or six hours looking for opportunities, often watching hooded crows, great black-backed gulls and ravens who themselves have made a living off lambing since the dawn of farming. That’s what brings them in, especially the young birds. They have scavenged off mankind since neolithic times, and now all of a sudden, just when we have brought them back from the brink of extinction, back to areas they have historically always been present, certain people and organisations want rid of them again because they are blamed for disrupting our sheep farming.’ He adds that the reputation that the bird has among farmers is, as far as he can see, a significant miscarriage of wildlife justice.

He continues: ‘The eagles are wrongly accused of countless lamb deaths based on spurious evidence: things like seeing eagles carrying lambs, being seen feeding on dead lambs, farmers finding carcasses which have been fed on, or ‘black loss’ (when lambs just vanish into thin air). It is as if organisations like NFU (Scotland) completely disregard the basic sea eagle ecology of scavenging. The eagles use a survival technique known as klepto-parasitism. They steal fish off otters, make gannets throw up their mackerel and routinely steal the remains of lambs from other predators. And that’s when they get photographed.’

Even though the dominant element in the eagle’s diet at lambing time seems to be breeding seabirds, hares and goslings, this is not a problem that is conveniently going to go away, especially with an increasing population of eagles, and a decreasing population of seabirds. Recent work that has looked at remains left in nests, most of which do not contain lambs at all, has reported a trend that indicates that more lambs are being taken live and less as carrion, and that these losses can have a measurable long-term impact on the viability of sheep farms. This is not a problem elsewhere in Europe, possibly because the sea-eagle breeding cycle in Scotland coincides so directly with peak West Coast lambing periods.

Some possible solutions are being trialed elsewhere, such as diversionary feeding, and Italian Maremma sheepdogs that could be embedded in the flock and trained to chase off eagles, but it is fundamentally a problem that rumbles on. As you would expect, there are endless working groups, management schemes and even the inevitable national stakeholder group, but the truth that dare not speak its name is the one that rears its head at every turn, the brutal primacy of our own species’ needs over every other one. In a country that has lost around 50% of its biodiversity in the last 70 years, there is little sign as yet that we are prepared to take the difficult decisions we need to so as to adapt our own lives to nature, rather than insisting nature continues to do it for us. Like paying reality prices for our meat, eating less of it and, from that, decreasing our livestock numbers. When it comes down to it, our needs have to win, every time.

Sheer awe and wonder. But what next?

Out of the corner of my eye as we head slowly back over the wine-dark sea towards Tobermory, I spot a dark shape slanting towards us from the west. Her size seems out of all proportion to the local birdlife, too huge for binoculars to be of any use, too personal for a photograph, and she is

heading straight over our boat, darkening the airspace maybe thirty foot above us. I am generally wary of exaggerating the emotion of nature, but this time my breath catches in my throat with the awe of the moment, and I find myself gasping. I have been seeing these birds for weeks now, but generally only far away, and high up; this one so close to me is like a glimpse over the wall and into the secret garden. For a few seconds, we watch her pass right over us. We see every movement of her huge head, her yellow eyes scanning us from above, and pick out the details of her vast, flesh-tearing bill. We see the great plank of her two and a half metre wings, so huge that they are almost an obstacle to light, and the end feathers twitching in the breeze of her flight. We see her huge, slow wingbeats. As she heads away from us, the white tail fans out behind her, and only then does anyone say anything. It was as if she had, for a brief moment in time, awakened in us some ancestral memory of how our skies once were and now are again.

In our Anthropocene world, her presence here is nothing short of a miracle, and a sign of the good that we, too, can do, if we have a mind to.

As a species ourselves, we have some tough decisions to take if we are going to keep her here.

By Roger Morgan-Grenville

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