Saturday, December 04, 2021
As I pulled into the lay-by at Ardmair and got out of the car, I was aware of two things. The first was a white-tailed sea eagle, flying low along the beach towards the spit - and the second was the ghostly tremolo call of a great northern diver carrying up from the sea.
The eagle landed among the seaweed-covered rocks while a couple of gulls dive-bombed it, and one pursued it as it flew away - carrying something, possibly, but my picture's too poor to tell what.
The diver meanwhile had fallen silent and I never actually saw it; but the incident rang a bell. Back in 2017 (blogpost April 8) I was watching and snapping a white-tailed sea eagle at Poolewe as "the wavering calls of a great northern diver carried up from the loch". I noted that the calls ceased once the eagle had passed over, and wondered if there was a connection; I couldn't, however, find anything in the literature about the tremolo being an alarm call. This, then, was a doubly interesting encounter.
// posted by Christine @ 2:17 PM 
