The great outdoors: It’s only natural that our majestic sea eagles should be free to soar as part of Scotland’s magnificent wildlife heritage

A memory of a sea eagle trapped in a zoo haunts our writer, a trip to Lismore refreshes his love for nature

The first sea eagle I ever saw still haunts me after more than 30 years – for all the wrong reasons. It was in a zoo.

I despise zoos, all zoos. I was visiting that one because I had to attend a meeting there, the purpose of which escapes me now. It must have seemed important at the time because I do remember protesting at the venue, and being overruled, yet I went anyway.

I was barely through the gate when I saw the sea eagle, a huge grey curve on a perch in a fenced enclosure, as morose a creature as I ever had the misfortune to see with my own eyes. Whatever the reason for the eagle’s incarceration, its eyes were dulled by it, its spirit broken.

Happily, my intervening years are liberally strewn with sea eagles from the island west to the mainland east, from Orkney to the Ochil Hills. It is because of their raw presence across landscapes, seascapes and skies that reinforces the possibilities of reintroducing nature’s lost species – and so invigorates a nature writer’s imagination – that I have never relinquished the memory of that singular, symbolic incarceration.

At the time, I was simply disgusted, offended. Over the years, that disgust has found its voice. That captive bird was denied flight, and that is to deny the bird its very eagle-ness. In exactly the same way, Scottish zoos today incarcerate wolves as a visitor attraction and deny them travel. Long-distance earth-travel is the wolf’s natural habitat, as long-distance flight is the sea eagle’s.

From time to time, usually when I am watching a sea eagle jousting with ocean winds, that brow-beaten zoo bird shuffles sideways out from an eerie corner of my mind to effect its silent rebuke of my species – the one that sentenced it to life imprisonment and wiped the sea eagle race off our portion of the Earth.

Yes, far-sighted and thoughtful nature conservation has brought it back to Scotland and it has begun to prosper again. But still, vested interests in our species rage against it and demand that it should be controlled; demand that it should be physically prevented from behaving naturally, its eagle-ness denied, wherever its presence happens to be inconvenient for those vested interests’ singularly unnatural relationship with the land.

Too many people will never accept that attempting to manipulate nature rather than adapting to nature is the ultimate folly of our species, the fatal human weakness.

One sea eagle locked up in a zoo haunting a corner of my mind for 30 years is eloquently symbolic of all that, and from time to time it still insists on its pound of flesh. It is why, when in the third decade of the 21st Century people talk of “rogue sea eagles”, I tend to celebrate the presence of sea eagles in our midst with a particular sense of natural justice.

The ferry from Port Appin to Lismore is one of my favourite ways to change the world in 10 minutes. Two eiders greeted me on the pier, and I can’t ask for a better omen than that. Eiders have a talismanic presence in my life. They have a happy habit of rescuing me on lonely shores, and they make me smile.

A perch on a level shelf of limestone for lunch offered an uninterrupted view of a small clutch of islands and skerries that have “otters” written all over them. I know them and their otters of old. But in the middle of the day they were keeping their heads down.

Despite their absence, “lunch” stretched into two of the more agreeable hours I have ever spent in the island west. There were grey seals on the skerries, and great northern divers drifting by.

The sea began to respond to the sun’s sluggish emergence by changing and deepening colours in horizontal bands, darkening by degrees into the distance. Ardgour’s handsome mountain profile shrugged off clouds, bared its shoulders and flaunted its summits.

The rising tide finally dislodged the seals from the skerries and with them went the blissful mood, but still, that was my idea of a working lunch. A rough path dipped towards the shore where the evidence of otters was omnipresent: a litter of spraints stitched with fish bones, crab claws and broken shells. And then, from the shore of Port Ramsay, just as full sunlight began to invade, the haunting visitation returned.

A familiar shape emerged from a cursory scan of a wood across the water, an erect grey-brown slab that looked too big and too heavy for the comfort of the tree where it appeared to have been hung, like a sheet out to dry. A careful second look revealed that it was not hung but perched, then it raised its head from its breast where it had been rearranging its feathers with an implement that looked like a cross between a sickle and a banana, and instantly, it became a sea eagle.

And there it stood and there it stared, and there it settled into a prolonged stillness, looking as if it might spend the rest of the afternoon there. And there in my mind’s eye was that brow-beaten zoo bird shuffling sideways from its corner.

The stance of the zoo bird and the stance of the Lismore bird were nearly identical, but of course, the crucial difference was the nature of the lives these birds led.

I homed in on the wonder of the sea eagle that warmed to a Hebridean afternoon despite being in full view of human settlement and humankind’s noise.

A collie barked. Two people worked on a boat. Three more chatted in a garden between house and shore. Two cars met at a corner, stopped there while the drivers conversed through open windows, engines running.

The sea eagle feigned disinterest, but it’s a safe bet that it saw everything. Not one of the people appeared to notice it – either that or it was there so often that it had become part of their landscape. I let the zoo bird see this in my mind.

“See,” I told it, “this is how things are now. We are capable of this too.”

Into the wild: jimcrumleynature.com