S o THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



Two centuries later Sir Robert Sibbald, in his History of 

 Fife and Kinross, made the following specific statement with 

 reference to the natural history of the May : 



"There is good fishing about this isle all the year over, because 

 many fish haunt about it, many seals are slain upon the east side of 

 it ; and many fowls frequent the rocks of it, the names the people 

 gave to them, are skarts, dunturs, gulls, scouts, kittiewakes ; the last 

 is so named from its cry, it is of the bigness of an ordinary pigeon, 

 some hold it to be as savoury and as good meat as a partridge is. 

 The scout is less than an ordinary duck, and of its colour ; the flesh 

 of it is hard ; it has eggs bigger than these of geese, the shells are of 

 a green colour, with some black spots scattered here and there upon 

 them." 1 



The name " skart " was doubtless then, as now, applied to 

 cormorant and shag alike; the "duntur" (or dunter) is the 

 Eider Duck, and by the " scout," as the description of its egg 

 shows, is here meant the Common Guillemot. A few pages 

 further on in the same work, at the end of an account of 

 the " fowls " that haunt the Firth of Forth, we read : " The 

 Duntur haunts the May, as most of the former [seventeen 

 species], except the solan-geese, do." 



My next quotation is from the article on the parish of 

 Anstruther-Wester in the {Old) Statistical Account of Scot- 

 land, published in 1792, and is as follows : " It [Isle of May] 

 is frequented by a great variety of sea fowl, such as kittie- 

 wakes, scarts, dunters, gulls, sea-pyets, marrots, etc." 2 



The only addition to Sibbald's list is the Oystercatcher 

 (sea-pyet), for among the Forth fishermen the term " marrot " 

 is synonymous with " scout," and covers both guillemot and 

 razorbill. 



Patrick Neill, as we learn from his notes in the Scots 

 Magazine for 181 1, p. 565, landed on the May on the morning 

 of 5th August of that year ; but he makes very little reference 

 to the birds. He writes : 



"We were early enough to find the thousands of kittiwakes and 



1 From pages 101 and 102 of the 1803 edition which was based on 

 that of 1710. In the 1710 edition I find the passage quoted occurs on 

 pp. 44 and 45. 



2 Statistical Account of Scotland, iii., 1792, p. 84. Reproduced, word 

 for word, in the New Statistical Account, ix., 1845, P- 612. 



