Isle of Mull
In July 2024 me and a couple of friends had our first visit to the beautiful Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland. As someone that’s been interested in wildlife for a long time, it’s always been on my list of places I needed to visit. It was also the perfect opportunity to test my van which I had recently added insolation and sound deadening to, to make it more suitable for camping in. Driving there and having my own transport while on the island gave us a lot more freedom to go and see what we wanted, when we wanted, as public transport on the Isle of Mull is pretty limited. Driving all that way also added to the sense of adventure.
As it was our first trip to the Isle of Mull, we had a long list of things we would love to see and do, mostly based around the wildlife. The main things on my list to hopefully find were the sea eagles, golden eagles, otters, puffins and a bit of whale/dolphin watching. We booked two trips out on boats before we went. One which took us to the Isle of Lunga and to see Fingals cave. On that trip we got extremely lucky with the weather, it was bright skies all day, so it enabled us to get some beautiful photos of the puffins, razorbills and other sea birds on and around the islands. The other boat trip was purely for whale watching, we didn’t go to other islands, we just went around the ocean hoping to find some whales and dolphins. We weren’t quite as lucky with the weather on that trip, there was a fair amount of rain, with the occasional dry spell. It was still a good trip though, we didn’t manage to see whales, but we did find quite a lot of dolphins and had a pod join us and ride the bow waves of the ship. This is when I found out how extremely difficult it is to try and photograph them jumping out of the water. I ended up with a lot of shots of random splashes and the occasional fin. Another amazing siting from the boat trips were the sea eagles. Thanks to the guides that spotted them and pointed them out to us up on the cliffs, we saw a juvenile and some adults. A little far for any amazing photos, but just seeing them was a treat.
Another goal outside of the wildlife spotting was to hike up Ben More. Again we got incredibly lucky with the weather on the day we decided to do that. It was a great day and well worth the effort to go up there. The cloud cover did make the view a little hard to see, but there were some breaks in the cloud which enabled us to see the beautiful views and get some photos. Then to make it even better, on the way down we saw some sea eagles fly past, again there was a juvenile and a couple of adults flying around. Seeing a kestrel near the juvenile really gave a sense of how large those birds are.
The only species we weren’t able to find when we were there were the otters and golden eagles. We spent a lot of time walking around the lochs and tried to go to some locations we’d seen in other peoples videos, but unfortunately couldn’t find the otters. So that gives me an excuse to go back and do it all again. We did manage to see lots of other animals which weren’t on the list, such as red deer and a huge variety of birds and also the local highland cows in their incredible coats.
These are some of my favourite photos from that trip. A few of them are also available as prints from the shop page if you like what you see.
