DOES NOT CARE FOE EGGS. 59 



your fields and forests, and play havoc with your 

 fisheries into the bargain. 



Believe me, it is not with any felonious intent 

 that the dipper visits the spawning-beds. He 

 would not give a chirp to breakfast on the 

 daintiest fish-eggs that speckled trout or silver 

 salmon ever laid. Fat larvas, plump savoury 

 water-beetles, and delicate young freshwater 

 molluscs, are his delight ; and he knows well 

 the weakness such robbers have for new-laid 

 eggs, and, like a sensible bird, goes where the 

 eggs are, to find them an obedience to instinct 

 that often costs him his life. 



I have opened the stomachs of dozens of dip- 

 pers, when collecting for the purpose of Natural 

 History (not only in this country, but in the 

 United States, British Columbia, Texas, and 

 Oregon, where all the streams are alive with 

 salmon and trout), and never in a single instance 

 did I discover other than the remains of insects 

 and freshwater shells. 



A Highland clan, a weed, and the ouzel are 

 severally classed, in a quaint old distich (quoted 

 in the ' Dictionary of Animated Nature'), as the 

 direst enemies of the Moray. Thus it runs : 



The Gordon, the guile,* and the water craw 

 Are the very worst ills th e Moray ever saw. 



* Guile, a weed destructive to corn-lands. 



