Return of the Sea King
In the year 1975, on the wind-scoured Isle of Rum, beneath skies carved by gull and cloud, the first of the White-tailed Eagles returned, a reintroduction, not of a bird, but of a memory. A decade passed before the first young hatched on the neighbouring Isle of Mull, as though the land itself had to remember how to cradle such wildness.
In the time that followed, the eagles turned their golden eyes westward, to the crofted shores of the Outer Hebrides. Their colonisation was slow, cautious, like old kings re-entering a forgotten kingdom.
A lone pair came to Harris in 1983, harbingers of what was to come, though it would not be until the mid 1990s that the wings of others beat down upon Lewis and South Uist. Then the growth began in earnest. By the year 2014, twenty-five pairs nested across those isles—twenty-five vigils kept in sea-cliffs and sky.
To the south, beyond the sea-roads of Rum and Mull, the tale repeated. Hesitant at first, then ever bolder, the eagles came.
On the 3rd of November, 1992, after more than a century of silence, a juvenile eagle was glimpsed close to the Clauchland Hills of Arran. It was a brief visitation, no more seen until 2004. But behind the curtain of time, another chapter was being written.
Between 1993 and 1998, a second reintroduction stirred the wild heart of Wester Ross. In the years that followed, the sightings on Arran grew in number, like the mounting echoes of an ancient song: one in 2006, two in 2008, two again in 2009, and more still in each passing year. By 2020, twenty such sightings graced the records, a pair lingering on Arran’s western edge through the hush of December.
In 2021, fifteen sightings were made in the year’s opening months, though the island’s stones have yet to cradle an eagle’s egg once more. Still, the trend is upward, as sure as the tide follows the moon. Now, it is believed that some 150 pairs keep watch across Scotland, harbingers of a wildness reborn, the ghosts of old majesty clothed once again in feather and flight.
Statistics gathered from The Scottish Ornithologists’ Club.
Majestic beings! A look of the harpie when they sit above you on a rocky outcrop, funny gangly youngsters learning to fish from the shoreline. But oh when they fly overhead what a sight they are. We see them often here in Kintyre, a breeding pair somewhere. It was Mull that we fell in love with them, were first awed by their size. Every sighting is spectacular. Thank you for bringing this fascinating history of reintroduction to me. Success can happen, reasons for optimism.
The Isle of Wight Sea Eagle project has also helped the reintroduction