66 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



constituted, seems, however, to have been almost overlooked 

 by ornithologists. I say almost, because the district which 

 extends from Ullapool to Rhu Coigach (a distance of 30 miles 

 or more) formed at the time the work was written a detached 

 part of the county of Cromarty, and was included in the 

 area described by Messrs. Harvie-Brown and Buckley in 

 their " Vertebrate Fauna of Sutherland, Caithness, and West 

 Cromarty." It was only to be expected, however, that, even 

 in so comprehensive a work as this, the authors should have 

 been able to devote but a meagre portion of their space to 

 a district whose fauna could differ from that of the adjoining 

 regions of Sutherland only in respect of its greater poverty. 



My friend the Rev. Horatius N. Bonar, who has on 

 several occasions visited Coigach in autumn, had been 

 greatly impressed with the number of birds which he always 

 found there at that season ; and he naturally enough con- 

 cluded that the locality must in spring also be rich in bird- 

 life. Not quite sharing this opinion, I nevertheless thought 

 that a region so remote and so sparsely populated might be 

 likely to afford good results. 



As a matter of fact, however, the physical conditions of 

 the district are not conducive to a rich avifauna. The almost 

 total absence of trees forms an insuperable barrier to the 

 presence of the vast majority of our small song-birds. The 

 aspect of the most part of Coigach is forbidding and sinister 

 in the extreme. Here and there along the shores of the 

 lochs, or by the side of some rugged mountain torrent, a few 

 stunted birch trees contrive to exist in spite of the sterility 

 of the soil and the rigours of the winter ; but their presence, 

 far from lending pleasure to the eye, only brings into bolder 

 display the poverty of their surroundings. The description 

 of it given by Dr. Ross in the " New Statistical Account " is 

 as literally true now as it was then : " The appearance is that 

 of a wide and dreary waste of bleak and barren heath, as if 

 a segment of the great ocean, agitated and tossed and 

 troubled, not by an ordinary storm, however violent, but by 

 some frightful convulsion of nature, with here and there a 

 rude and lofty peak of rugged rock towering to the skies, 

 had been suddenly condensed and formed into a solid and 

 shapeless mass of unproductive desert, without one spot of 



