The White Island

Call it the White Island, or Kyleakin, Lighthouse Island or. in Highland Gaelic, Eilean Bhan. By any name, it is the subject of Sir John Lister-Kaye's first book, THE WHITE ISLAND (1973). It is an 8 1/2 acre speck of the Inner Hebrides. In September 2008, 20 American Elderhostelers, including my wife and myself, crossed the 500 meter Skye Bridge from the Scottish mainland at Kyle of Lochalsh to the large and much sung island of Skye whither Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald fled after the 1746 Battle of Culloden. The White Island now holds up a column of that bridge. ***

There was no bridge in March 1968 when young John Lister-Kaye first set foot on the White Island. He had accepted an invitation from renowned naturalist and author (RING OF BRIGHT WATER) Gavin Maxwell to collaborate on a book on British wildlife and to build on Eilean Bhan a zoo of Scottish and other wild animals. Sadly, Maxwell succumbed to cancer within a year and both projects were abandoned. Today the White Island is a Government bird and animal sanctuary. Sir John, now the Eighth Baronet Lister-Kaye, went on to pioneering wildlife and educational work of his own near Loch Ness. ***

THE WHITE ISLAND is a very good first book by a man who has since produced many more, including a novel, ONE FOR SORROW. Read it as an early chapter in British wildlife conservation. Read it for Teko, its world famous tame otter and a fascinating array of other creatures both tame and wild, including Owl, a pet gannet, basking sharks, petrels, herrings and whales. THE WHITE ISLAND also brings to three-dimensional reality legendary Gavin Maxwell, a handful of Scots and others at work to build the zoo and tend the animals, the racing tides of The Straits of King Hakan of Norway, howling gales and the island's still standing lighthouse built by a grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. The book fills its modest ecological niche very nicely.

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