DOES NOT CARE FOR 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 larvae, 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 
egos 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 the Moray ever saw. 
* Guile, a weed destructive to corn-lands. 
