'England thy beauties are tame and domestic
To one who has roved on the mountains afar'
Now I don't know Byron all that well (given that he's dead) but from his writing I can only assume he's never visited central Manchester on a Friday night. Yes one walk down Oxford Road on a Friday night would indeed confirm England's beauties are not tame. Nor are they domestic. But I suppose we can give him a little poetic licence, for indeed there is nowhere where the couplet is more true than the Isle of Mull.
You catch the boat out from Oban harbour to get there, a small CalMac job but more than adequate for the island's handful of inhabitants. There are probably more sheep than people. There are certainly more fish, in the farms moored offshore in the Sea Lochs. We were bound for a holiday on the north side of Loch Na Keal in central Mull, of Sea Eagle fame and featured on so many photography websites I won't bother naming any of them. Still, as the sun set over the loch we arrived.
I do not want to do a conventional trip report, a blow-by-blow account of what i've done on the island. Instead I shall write by classification. I shall perhaps do two or three posts, but lets start with one. I want to look at the Loch itself, something inescapable when I look back on my time on Mull, probably because it was right in front of me for a lot of the time. Maybe its something deeply ingrained in my being. But its probably the former.
We visited in April, a time that is traditionally a time of green shoots and newborn lambs, but March decided to forego the whole 'in like a Lion, out like a lamb' thing and decided it was best just to be a Lion the whole time. So there weren't so many spring visitors, but an abundance of winter ones. One of the most common was the Great Northern Diver, a bird assosiated with the high arctic in the summer and the British coast in the winter. As they swam in the Loch where the water reflects the mountainside they looked particularly elegant...
...but in the evenings I noticed some behaviour i'd never seen before in Divers, rafting. This is when many birds gather together in a huddle on the sea. But Divers are nearly always singletons, or at best are found in small groups. Therefore the sight of 27 one evening was something of a surprise...
They're never found close to the shore under normal conditions, so I had to make do with these distance views. But nice views of what is a bird of which I know very little. One day on Mull we did indeed go on the now famous boat the Lady Jayne in seach of Sea Eagles. The Sea Eagles of Loch Na Keal have become local celebrities and every morning the Lady Jayne's procession up the loch is watched from the shore by birders and locals alike, waiting for the eagle to come along. The setup is this: the boat sets off into the Loch and on the way picks up a small army of gulls which feed on bits thrown over the side. The flock attracts the eagle's attention and when the partner returns to take over nest duties the bird comes out. However, whilst waiting for this happy event I did get some decent images of Common Gulls, not something I often photograph...
...but the reals star was yet to arrive. About two hours passed of chatting and drinking tea, the latter for me leathal and I ended up below decks soon enough, not to put too fine a point on it. Whilst I was below the shout went up that an Eagle had just been seen, so I rushed up to see a large speck coming our way. The way this works is that the Eagle comes for a fish, takes it and then leaves. However, it first did a pass overhead...
...and then he's steep into a dive. Now i've seen Osprey dive, and this fella is so much bigger with such massive wings that surely he can't match the Osprey for speed? But he can, oh he can...
But its one of those moments i'm sure all film-makers and photographers get when they're completely detatched from the action are 'watching' but not 'observing' the subject, everything's light, apeture and shutter speeds. But sometimes the shot just comes off and you're grateful, especially with a burst of images at 171mm of which 2 are usable...
...but then he's gone off to eat his snack, and this is the reason he's not tame. He really isn't arsed what's going on aboard the boat, he won't take any crap and won't 'perform', what he will take is a fish and he'll take it first time. Then bugger off. Yea.
But then you're off home and the day's light is all but spent. It was at this point I indulged my need to revise and work for my A Levels. But in the evening as night falls it is the time of the landscape photographer, and well, it would be rude not to attempt a few 'birdscapes', like this Red Breasted Merganser against the Isle of Staffa...
...and then night falls. As I say i've never seen Scottish weather like this, so i've also never seen the Milky Way in its entirety ever. But by God its pretty good out there on the Hebrides, so I tried a star trail or two over the loch. This one's over Ben More...
...So a day out on Loch Na Keal ain't bad is what i'm saying. This is quite a broad-based photography approach, prehaps next time i'll do something more 'species specific'. but I dunno.
