436 BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS 



" glead " made off for the mainland. From the descrip- 

 tion, this glead was no doubt a buzzard, being a large 

 dark-brown bird with broad heavy wings and straight- 

 edged tail. In answer to a question as to size, S 



remarked that it "was not half so big as the eagle (of 

 1 88 1) : that bird was as large as a canny-sized laddie 

 sitting on the sands ! " 



In cruising year after year over the same grounds, one 

 notices small geological changes (if the word be admissible) 

 constantly going on, and the causes are often interesting. 

 A little mussel-spawn happens accidentally to become 

 deposited by the current on sand, instead of on its natural 

 bed of mud. As the young mussels grow, the mud 

 also appears to grow around them — the mussels create it. 

 After a while the zostera begins to take root, and in a 

 few years a stretch of several acres of mud, with all its 

 peculiar vegetable and crustacean productions, has from 

 such small beginnings been created, in the midst of sand. 

 This in time forms a fresh haunt and feeding'-ground for 

 wildfowl. Ducks are now regularly found where none 

 were ever known before those vagrant particles of mussel- 

 spawn drifted on to uncongenial sand. Of course such 

 increases are counterbalanced by denudations elsewhere 

 — the tide here and there sweeping away a superstratum 

 of mud, and laying bare the non-productive sand below. 

 Sand is proverbially a shifty substance, and every year 

 its local geography alters more or less ; old channels 

 disappear, and new waterways open up through the 

 midst of what was before quite solid ground. 



Wildfowling is essentially a waiting; game, and the long 

 hours one often has to spend in the creeks "waiting 

 on " the tide, or for fowl to appear, give' opportunity of 

 becoming tolerably well acquainted with, at least, the super- 



