He’s gone, is John. Like the fulmars that used to line the cliffs of the Isle of Eigg’s south-facing bays off Scotland’s west coast. Like them, he was such a part of the island, that it feels wild he’s no longer physically there. His name was John Chester, but he was, is, known as John the Bird. And for good reason. As Eigg’s unparalleled nature expert, John was Scottish Wildlife Trust’s warden on the island for over 30 years, becoming a much-loved part of the community, integral to the island’s landowner buy-out, and training generations of young would-be conservationists. In a rapidly changing world, his legacy feels important to share – what a person can do when they fully learn and love a place.
I’d heard tell of John for years before I met him. How he’d scaled a cliff and kept an injured eagle fed so that its wing could heal. How he knew every inch of the island, in every kind of weather. How his threatened eviction in the 1990s had been a catalyst in the fight for community island ownership; the need to protect Eigg’s nature becoming central to its bid for freedom. Though nominally retired from SWT in 2015, John kept up a watch on the birds and moths till his last.
I finally met him when I volunteered myself in the summer of 2021. The new SWT warden, Norah Barnes, and I had come across him out the back of the pier café, scanning for shore-birds. Tanned face, soft voice, though undergirded with the authority that springs from knowing. He was eating a bacon roll, but seemed to be feeding most of it in a faux-exasperated way to the “little moocher” under the table, a scruffy chestnut dog – not his. He wore corduroy trousers with the ridges worn right down, a sun-scorched SWT t-shirt, and a dark jacket that must’ve seen better days, months, years. Binoculars round his neck. Notebook out. Trusty telescope leaning against the table. You’d likely miss him in a crowd. But all the better to see the birds.
John managed a log of bird sightings on Eigg, fed into by other islanders. Days as a volunteer were a carousel of shorebird watches, butterfly quadrants, and moth traps – surveys which John had set up to contribute to national data-banks. He dropped wisdom unassumingly. It helped to be close by. If a black seabird is with others, it is likely a Shag. Lone and large: a Cormorant. In the bay, his beloved Arctic Terns, like sky scimitars, skiff the surf. I struggled to identify birds in all their bob and blur. John told me to really look at a bird, take every part of them in. Say aloud what you see. Knowing birds, he said, is something that comes slowly over time. He’d reached the point where sometimes he knew a bird without knowing exactly how. It all comes down to noticing. A sound methodology for respecting a place.
Rare migratory birds blow in on ill winds. Sometimes they stay an hour, sometimes weeks. (Some, in human form, the rest of their lives). Eigg is not the most obvious place to land; outlying islands like Barra provide a better-placed stop. But there’s always the chance. An Eastern Yellow Wagtail descended on Eigg in 2020. He regaled me with the story of the mad dash to identify it, and its eventual confirmation by the British Birds Rarities Committee.
John set a moth trap by the Mill burn twice a week. A motley group of interested islanders and volunteers would make the pilgrimage to John’s cottage, accessed through an Escallonia hedge so dense it was like a portal to another world. Sparse light, crowding leaves, thrush nests overhead. John’s own nest was simple. The one main room cave-like, where the darkness only served to emphasise the light. Like the best caves, it was warm and dry, a bit dusty in the corners; a safe haven for naturalists and moths alike. Bookshelves burst with crime novels. On one wall, a corkboard covered in postcards from friends and ex-volunteers. A well-worn sofa, a woodburning stove. A Tupperware of chocolate biscuits to sustain all who visited. By the window, a large desk looking out to the almighty hedge and a view over the bay. It was here he would gather us to see the moths.
My eye tuned in, I would immediately think: Shape. Size. Markings. Colours. Wing edges. Underwings. Always the desire to get there first. To see John’s pleasure and a rare smile at your comprehension. But there was no beating wee Maggie. On the verge of 12, she had been a moth club regular for years. Eyes alight, she recognised them even when they were fluttering, before the rest of us had even brought them into focus. She yelled their names out: Engrailed Clay, Chevron, Black Rustic.
Only occasionally, John mentioned collapse. In reference to the seabird populations. I got the sense John didn’t like to talk about it much. Or perhaps for him it was so clear, so stark, that he didn’t feel the need to elaborate. The shorebirds are also declining, likely from lack of sand eels and glut of rats. The butterflies dwindling too, their lifecycles out of synch with the out-of-whack weather. John’s response was to keep on as witness. To show up, record, instil a sense of care in others.
One of the last times I saw John, I joined him for a walk down the farm track towards Laig bay. The late summer sun falling warm and rich around our shoulders. We were looking for rare migrants, though with more hope than reason, as the weather was good, the wind calm, the way to the south well laid out. Brambles were on the turn. Reeds rustled in the wind, a few small birds amongst them, but no migrants of note. We saw Meadow Pipits a-plenty and I learned their squeaky pip-pip-pip call. A gang of teenage Ravens flapped past, jostling together noisily in the air. At the turn of the track, John pointed out the Sand Martins’ burrows in a cut-out bank, looking like model Himalayan Buddhist retreat caves.
By the shore we watched a group of around a hundred Kittiwakes disturbed by crows into a wide arc of flight, before alighting again. John helped me to really see them. They have a ‘gentle’ face, he told me. And it’s true, they do. I found myself suddenly fond of them. With John’s help, I also saw Gannets. They are large, he noted, six times the size of our gentle Kittiwakes. Reinforced skulls prevent their heads exploding with the impact of hurtling downwards into the water for fish. They cut a characteristic dash of form – wings held to the side, head straight down.
Continuing up the track to Laig, we passed fields full of sheep but no obvious birdlife – not even the ubiquitous Greylag Geese. Suddenly out of this relative silence a cacophony rose up as a Heron thrashed and cawed in the air, a prehistoric dance, as a Kestrel bothered it from above. A strange pairing. After more wrangling, they separated and headed off in opposite directions. John thought the Kestrel was juvenile, just testing its newly-learned skills.
We stopped at Laig farmhouse for John to get a haircut from my stepsister, Saira. She’d volunteered with him years before and had ended up making a life on the island too, running a sheep farm. He sat on a stool outside while Saira deftly sheared him. We left his cut hair rolling in the breeze and climbed up to the giant’s footstep – a large waterlogged depression beneath the crags at Laig. Eigg’s three kinds of dragonfly dutifully showed themselves when we crouched at its edge, and I learned their names, and I felt care rising.
They say no man is an island, but John perhaps got closest. It strikes me we should all be aspiring to such. Not in the sense of cutting ourselves off, but in feeling intimately responsible for the ecosystems around us. Learning a place to the point of love. Loving a place to the point of care. Witnessing the losses. Truly seeing what is still there.
John himself died at the end of a long illness, at the end of 2024. In my mind’s eye though, he’s still on Laig beach. In Norah’s, he’s at the end of the pier. In Maggie’s, he’s on Beinn Bhuide ridge. On Eigg, he could be anywhere. Hunched and unassuming. Part of the whole. Binoculars to his eyes, trained on something we’re too far away to see. He’s intent. Unmoving. We increase our pace towards him as the waves wash into the bay and then out again into the sound between the islands of Eigg and Rum. In and out. Like the beating of a heart. Like a lifetime. Like the world taking a breath, and then, falteringly, another. We reach him, gasping a bit for ours, and say – so?! He lowers his binoculars, lifts one eyebrow wryly, and says with a sigh – bugger all. Then he returns the binoculars to their place against his eyes and continues his watch.
Cover photo credit: Polly Pullar
Iona Macduff
Iona Macduff is a writer from Highland Perthshire who’s lived in the Himalayas. She guest-edited Hinterland Magazine’s Climate Writing Special Issue, was shortlisted for the inaugural Future Places Environmental Essay Award, and is currently working on a book-length creative non-fiction project at the University of East Anglia.