Obituary: John Love, Champion of Sea Eagles

I received an unexpected email on Friday evening announcing the sad passing of John Love, who died at his cottage on South Uist on Wednesday 18 October 2023.

John’s name will always be synonymous with the reintroduction of the white-tailed eagle in Scotland. John was the original Sea Eagle Reintroduction Project Officer between 1975 – 1985, living on the Isle of Rum in Western Scotland and releasing a total of 82 Norwegian sea eagles in what was at the time an ambitious and pioneering effort.

He later worked as an Area Officer for SNH (now NatureScot) for Uist, Barra and St Kilda and after ‘retirement’ he worked as an expert guest speaker for a cruise company, having written books on eagles, penguins, sea otters, St Kilda, Rum, and even the natural history of lighthouses, but sea eagles remained his passion to the very end.

I first learned of John Love in 1999, planning my first trip to Madagascar to study the island’s critically endangered fish eagles. On a university field trip to Mull I met the now sorely missed Richard Evans, who was the RSPB’s eagle warden on Mull at the time, and he invited me to his cottage to talk eagles. He was kind to me and several cups of tea later, realising that my knowledge of eagles was limited at best, he took a small blue book from his bookshelf and handed it to me with the words, “You’ll be needing this“.

It was a first edition of John Love’s highly acclaimed 1983 book, The Return of the Sea Eagle and I’ve treasured it ever since.

I was lucky enough to get to know John in later years after meeting him at a raptor conference where he took an interest in my research on the Madagascar fish eagle. He later agreed to write a chapter for a book I was co-editing on people who studied eagles. Here’s the biography he sent through back in 2006:

‘Born in Inverness, the capital of the Highlands of Scotland, John has been interested in animals as long as he can remember. Joining the local Bird Club as a schoolboy in 1958 broadened his horizons, especially two summer weekend trips to the island of Handa, Sutherland in 1963 and 1964. (Islands and seabirds, especially Leach’s petrel, have always remained a passion, so John’s work on sea eagles has fitted nicely!) In winter, evening lecturers at the bird club included Seton Gordon, George Waterston, Charlie Palmer and Lea MacNally – all illustrious golden eagle enthusiasts. John trained as a bird ringer and spent several school holidays as a volunteer helping to protect what were at the time Scotland’s only pair of nesting ospreys. He graduated Honours in Natural History at the University of Aberdeen and did three years post-graduate research on bird predators of bivalve mussels.

It was on holiday on Fair Isle in June 1968, that John first encountered white-tailed sea eagles, when George Waterston and Dr Johan Willgohs arrived with four eaglets for release. This project was following of from a pioneering effort by George’s cousin, Pat Sandeman, who had set free three Norwegian sea eagles in Argyll in 1959. None of these seven birds survived to adulthood but paved the way for a more concerted effort in 1975 on the Isle of Rum National Nature Reserve in the Inner Hebrides.

Dr Morton Boyd, Dr Derek Ratcliffe and Dr Ian Newton were all instrumental in encouraging this new reintroduction attempt. It was several years before the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), finally agreed to support the project. In 1975 John Love was invited by the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) to help Dr Johan Willgohs collect the first four eaglets from northern Norway. Two weeks cruising with Johan in the heart of sea eagle country was both an inspiration and an education. The following year Harald Misund, a local eagle expert then in the Norwegian Air Force in BodØ, took over collecting eaglets for the Scottish project. John has since visited Norway many times and learnt so much from Harald, who remains a close friend.

From 1975 John lived on Rum where he released no fewer than 82 Norwegian sea eagles. His monograph on the reintroduction – ‘The Return of the Sea Eagle’ – was published in 1983. By 1985, when the first phase of the project ceased, the first Scottish-bred bird fledged in the wild. A further 59 eaglets were set free near Loch Maree on the west Scottish mainland between 1993 and 1998. As the population has grown, John has remained on the UK Project Team, though he now works in the Outer Hebrides as an Area Officer for Scottish Natural Heritage (formerly NCC), and where he helps monitor several breeding pairs of sea eagles. He has since written and illustrated several other books on eagles, penguins and sea otters, together with a detailed human history of the island of Rum. He is currently updating the sea eagle story’.

John was a huge supporter of this blog when I began writing it in 2010 and he became a confidante, writing long emails to rail against those whose continued blind prejudice against sea eagles infuriated him. After writing an opinion piece for the Press & Journal in 2021 in response to some ill-informed nonsense from a Director of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (here), he told me:

“…so it looks like we are facing attacks from east coast keepers/landowners as well as crofter/farmers on the west!!“

I’ll miss John, as will so many others fortunate to have known him, but what a legacy he leaves behind – I’ll think of him whenever I see one of his beloved sea eagles. RIP.