“We can’t stay here too long,” Jamie Boyle told us when we stepped out of the car. He had driven us to one of the most remote spots in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a tiny island called Vallay that hasn’t been inhabited for about a decade and is now accessible only by driving across the shallow ocean channel during low tide. We had maybe 30 minutes before the water would come back and we’d be stranded.

Boyle is a conservationist in the Scottish Highlands with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He had taken us to see some wildlife and to talk about what makes the Uists, a small chain of Hebridean islands, so unique. By the time we set up