They found us a golden eagle, a bird soaring along the length of a towering granite cliff above the sea.It appeared much darker than its cousin, although when it settled the golden feathers on its head, after which it is named, were clearly visible. Mull is Britain's "Eagle Island"; it is now not only home to more than half a dozen pairs of sea eagles (the exact figure is confidential); it has a similar number of golden eagle territories.Having seen the first, we asked a couple who run nature tours of the island to find us the second. Pam and Arthur Brown, retired farmers from Cheshire, started Discover Mull five years ago, and now take a Land Rover full of visitors out every day looking for eagles, otters on the seashore, and the other wildlife in which the island is rich. David Sexton saw it happen; he was one of a small team from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that in 1985 guarded the loch-side nest 24 hours a day until the chick flew. He remembers the agonising wait in a wretched summer, cold and wet, and the eventual "overwhelming joy and relief" when the young bird, the first hatched in Britain for 70 years, finally left the nest.Twenty years on, Sexton is back on Mull as the RSPB representative on the island, and this time he is not just guarding a sea eagle's nest; he is showing one to the public. Much thought went into the project, and great care, and there were high hopes of a new British breeding population, but they were a long time in being realised.It was not until fully 10 years had passed, when more than 80 young Norwegian birds had been released and supporters were beginning to despair of success, that a pair nested and raised a chick.When they did it was not on Rum, but on Mull, nearly 40 miles away. The last nest was seen in 1916; the last native British sea eagle was shot, on Skye, two years later.In 1975, however, they began to come back.

A reintroduction project saw young birds flown in from northern Norway, where the population remains healthy, and released on the Hebridean island of Rum. They regarded the bird as a lamb-stealing rival and persecuted it to extinction in most of Britain; it retreated to a last stronghold in the Highlands and Islands.There it was further persecuted by Victorian collectors, the more so ,the rarer it became, until eventually it succumbed. They remind us, with an exhilarating shock, that there is more to life than the ways in which we are bound: to commuting, to mortgages, to inescapable routine in air-conditioned offices. Is there a bigger distance from a computer screen on a desk than to a wild eagle?Perhaps that's why the sight is so utterly liberating. The white-tailed sea eagle once nested throughout Britain, from the Isle of Wight to the Shetlands. It was more familiar than the golden eagle and is the bird of many old legends, poems and songs.But the farmers and landowners of recent centuries did not share the eagle-awe of earlier peoples, and they had firearms. Nothing binds an eagle, except fate itself.They are on Mull, these two, the big craggy Scottish island, and they are part of a remarkable renaissance.

It seems to live on in our tissues, the awe which our distant ancestors must have felt for these magnificent killers that were a familiar part of their cold and cruel world, birds which symbolised so much: survival, strength, supremacy, splendour.They are hardly part of our world today. Then with a dip of its shoulder the other is dropping faster towards it with talons extended like an aircraft's landing gear.The two great birds converge; two sets of talons stretch out; and then they clash in a writhing of wings, and you are shouting out loud, what is it? A fight? But no, it's a greeting, a majestic aerial handshake, and they wheel away skywards again as their two black chicks, six weeks old and already bigger than crows, look quizzically upwards.The sight of these birds triggers powerful feelings inside us, feelings that must be inherited, and very ancient. You've heard so much about them, you've built up to the moment so much, and now you can hardly believe that they're there in front of you. Watching eagles in the wild is like watching legends, like watching Pele play football, or Nureyev and Fonteyn dance. In one count last winter we counted more wigeon on the reserve than there are in the picture, so if he's looking down, I would think that he would be very pleased."Further information from .uk. On the wall of the meeting room we have a painting by Peter Scott of his vision of the site, which he left unfinished at his death in 1989."It shows a large flock of wigeon flying in, with the London skyline in the background. And it just keeps on growing - new bird and insect species are coming in all the time.