io ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



East English Coasts it was quite phenomenal. But Shetland 

 appears only to have been brushed, as it were, by the outer- 

 most primaries of the right wing of the flight, and only a few 

 " dropped feathers " — a few solitary migrants — helped us to 

 swell our list. The direction of the wind prior to the 4th 

 October was southerly, veering to S.S.E. and S.S.W., and 

 few migrants were observed. But on the 5 th, and night of 

 5 th and 6th, migration became more noticeable, both as 

 observed at the lighthouse, and by ourselves in the open. 

 This was the fringe of a vast migration, which will be found 

 duly recorded by other observers farther to the southward. 

 The wind had been northerly and strong, but during the 

 night a sudden shift took place to S.E., and increasing to a 

 gale, whipped up the migrants which had already started on 

 their passage of the North Sea, and drifted them on our 

 shores. But in Shetland we only got a slight waft of this 

 change, and it did not last long enough to flood the islands 

 with migrants. Such were the conditions of migration during 

 the two visits we made to Shetland in 1891 and 1892. 



Of the place itself we must be very shortly descriptive. 

 The area we treat of contains the hill and cliffs and high 

 plateau of Fitful Head (928 feet), and the "scattald" or taxed 

 land which lies around it. 



It also contains the links of Ouendale, the sandhills, and 

 long washed sands of Quendale Bay, the rocky points of 

 Sumburgh Head and Garthness, and, out in the bay, the holms 

 of Quendale. It includes the more important lochs of Spiggie, 

 and Brow, and Hillwell, as well as a few other minor sheets 

 of water, with the marshes and marshy meadows, peat "cuts ' 

 and " banks," which connect or surround them. Then there 

 are the rocky, or sandy, or muddy voes of the South Coast, 

 and the rockier voes of the west side. Between the pastured 

 hills are glens and green-edged or marsh-edged burns. When 

 we add to the above description the stunted heather of the 

 high " fields," the short grazing of the " scattalds," the wind- 

 swept scalps, showing the disintegrating granitic rock in 

 rapidly recurring stripes or succeeding terraces, with the 

 " plantie cruives " or small enclosures in which young cabbage- 

 plants are protected from the storms, which are dotted over 

 the otherwise bare landscape, and the " farm-toons " with the 



