This is my last Scotland post. Well, for 2022 anyway.
It's been over two months since we returned from the north of Britain with a ton of memories. Ancient civilizations. Famous bridges. Caves. Mysterious stone circles. Whisky. Boats of every kind. Haggis. Battlefields. Castles. A complete lack of monsters in Loch Ness. Shipbuilding along the Clyde. David Livingstone's birthplace. Sculptures of giant horseheads. COVID. Cranachan. Gannets. Puffins. Maybe some other stuff here and there. And yes, I had to sneak the COVID in there.
Now it's time to close the posts on this trip and start thinking about the next one. So here goes the last Scotland post for this trip.
We love watching wildlife on our trips either here at home or when we travel abroad and for sure we got some amazing looks at two of the top seabirds in the world in day trips to see puffins and gannets in our time in Scotland. But our agenda had one more bird trip on it: a quest to see some eagles in the wild off the Isle of Mull. We've had some incredible sightings of bald eagles in Alaska and fish eagles in Africa in the past. Now it was time to add some white-tailed eagles to our list.
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| The first white-tailed eagle we spotted. And the only one on land. |
I never really considered myself much of a birder. Earlier in life I would have opted for four legged creatures over those with wings any day of the week. But getting out and about on our planet has made me appreciate birds in ways I couldn't have imagined. The tipping point may have been our trip to Kenya and Tanzania in 2018, but certainly watching things with feathers in New Zealand a year later and in our very own backyard while working at home for a while during a global pandemic certainly fueled that fire a good deal. Now I'm kind of hooked.
We've taken all sorts of trips looking for birds. Some have been in cars, some have been on foot and some have been in boats. The boat trips have either taken us out to some remote island or just to the middle of nowhere to find some true pelagic birds. Our eagle trip in Scotland also got us on the water, but it operated a little differently than any other bird trip we've ever taken.
Our past boat-based bird trips have been searching typically for masses of birds. Our day trips to Lunga or Bass Rock on this very Scotland trip searching for puffins or gannets are good examples of that sort of trip. On those two occasions, we headed for some nesting colonies, knowing the birds wouldn't be flying far from home with chicks needing to be taken care of.
We also attracted a good number of albatrosses on a boat ride out of Stewart Island on the very tip of New Zealand. Not nesting, but there in pretty large numbers and all after the chum that our boat was dumping into the ocean, evoking fishing boats discarding the unwanted (to humans) parts of fish that the mollymawks gladly gobbled down about as soon as the bits hit the water.
Our quest for eagles was different. Here we were on the water trying to get birds to come from the land to the boat. And not a lot of birds. Eagles are apex predators and those sorts of birds don't congregate together. Instead, they stay in pairs and occupy a lot of territory. No mass sightings here. Our looks would be very, very targeted. And possibly pretty isolated. We'd need to savor every chance we got.
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| White-tailed eagles on approach from afar and nearer. |
It wasn't like that. It was completely different.
Our afternoon west of Mull started slowly. We spotted a white-tailed eagle on land and then one in the air on sort of a fly-by along the coast. Clearly not interested in our boat or anything else really out on the water. We didn't drop fish into the water. This was confusing. Wasn't this what we were supposed to do to attract these birds?
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| The first eagle on the wing that we saw. I know these birds all look pasted into a bird-less pic but that's not the case. |
The first eagle we saw up close on our trip started from a long way away and yet it was obviously coming for us. It didn't cruise by the boat randomly or glide closely on some other errand to see what was going on. It made a beeline from its nest over a lot of water straight for our boat. It was purposeful and very, very deliberate and there was no fish in the water even. But it seemed to know what was coming. Whether it had been conditioned to associate our particular boat with food or whether this is a natural behavior, I can't say. But every eagle we saw up close that day did this exact same thing.
When it got close enough for us to see it clearly, our crew tossed a single fish in the water, which bobbed along the surface to be picked up. From here, the scene was intense. The eagle stopped flying and started floating, or so it seemed. No more flapping, just wings spread out intently, with every feather stretched out as far as it could be to support the bird hovering as much as possible. We could see the claws clutching and the eyes focused intently. And those gulls that had been trailing our boat for a while? No interest in that fish. Not with that eagle around. The power of that bird was palpable.
There's some irony here. Eagles, for all their apex-predator-ness, are not fishing birds. They are not ospreys or puffins or gannets or even gulls. They do not do well diving into or onto the water. In fact, they just don't do it at all. On the water, they are scavengers. Understanding this fact was a significant downgrade of my understanding of an eagle's hunting capability. Not that it made the look up close any less spectacular.
We boarded knowing that we might see golden eagles or white-tailed eagles. We ended up with just the white-tailed, which based on its wingspan is one of the largest eagles in the world. It was amazing to see a bird like this up close the way this tour offered. I would have liked more approaches but I'm not really sure how I get another chance to do this kind of thing again. Definitely an afternoon well spent.
When I wrote about our trip to see gannets on Bass Rock near Edinburgh, I lamented my skill, or lack thereof, in shooting pictures of birds in flight. I feel the same way about my prowess photographing eagles as I do about gannets. I need more practice. But I almost got the perfect shot; my camera just moved down a bit at the critical moment. Maybe it was the water but it was most likely me. What I ended up with, though, is my favorite eagle picture of the trip (it's below). The water looks a little savage and the coloring is a bit dark (darker than I remembered or the other pictures I took show) but the bird is in perfect profile while departing the surface of the sea with a fish that our boat had tossed out for it just minutes before. I love this picture.
From the time we sailed past the island on the CalMac Ferry; to driving along the shoreline to the multicolored village of Tobermory; to time out on the water looking for puffins and eagles; to walking to the lighthouse north of Tobermory; and everything in between. Mull was it. Eagles made Mull better but the ride home from the water gave us the most gorgeous views of the hills with beautiful blue sky and the fluffiest clouds projecting the softest shadows over the land.
I know that description sounds incredibly corny but it's completely true. The last picture I'm posting from this trip is an incredibly ordinary and amazing at the same time view from a boat ride back to the dock. Check out that landscape. I debated which picture I wanted to post of that return journey. Ultimately, I couldn't decide and elected to post two. Neither of these photos is the best I took on this trip, nor anywhere close to the best I've ever taken. But I love them more than most.
I'm hoping where we go next is as gorgeous as Mull.
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