Animal

Country diary: where eagles – and extreme ornithologists – dare


A dank February afternoon; the track descended to old quarries above Carreg y Llam, ending in a grassy, rubbish-strewn pit. My last visit here was in December 1990, for one of the memorable adventure experiences that Welsh sea cliffs provide – a 200-metre rock climb, named Fantan B by its pioneers after a pharmaceutical container for antidepressants they’d found in this clifftop hollow. It’s that sort of place.

I hadn’t come to climb, just to scan the cliff again for clues to a mystery from that previous encounter. It’s only visible from the sea, or by way of a frightening descent almost to sea level. Scraps of rusting hawser ran through a gap in the quarry wall, the sea shockingly far beneath. Damp grass heeled over in convex plunge, a foamy swell crashing and recoiling in a welter of spray from rocks below. Offshore a seal trod water and peered. Clinging to tussocks, by zigzag sheep paths and a sequence of guano-covered terraces slanting west, I reached a pink ledge. Round the shattered rib beyond was the huge, concave, auk-and-gull-haunted face of Carreg y Llam.

Extreme ornithology! It’s one of the great seabird breeding locations, silent and empty as yet but with seasonal restrictions on climbing (few come here for that) already in place. Through a glass I studied lines of huge overhangs hundreds of feet above. Back in 1990 I’d pulled through those, landing on a hidden ledge between them, with the biggest nest – far too large for ravens – I’d ever seen. Sizeable bones were littered all around. There’d been persistent rumours of white-tailed sea eagle sightings around Caernarfon Bay that winter. No eyrie was ever located. This was surely it, but ornithological record requires degrees of proof that put the average murder trial to shame.

A white-tailed sea eagle comes down to catch a fish.



A white-tailed sea eagle comes down to catch a fish. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty

Back then, twilight coming on, the hardest climbing remained to be done. I’d scurried on, expecting at any moment to be plucked into the air by something resembling Sinbad’s roc. Laughing memory of that panic saw me safely retreat to the slope of horrors in the present day. Maybe sea eagles will be here again soon, inaccessible, safe from human interference. What better place for them?



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