THE BIRD-LIFE OF THE SPEY VALLEY. 89 
its source in Loch Avon, amid a scene hardly to be surpassed 
for wild grandeur and impressive beauty in the whole of 
Scotland, especially when one comes upon it at the dawn of 
a midsummer day, and looks sheer down from a height of 
more than 1000 feet upon the clear green water, girdled by 
dark precipices glowing crimson in the rays of the rising 
sun, with snow-wreéaths lingering still in the deep gullies. 
After leaving the loch, the upper course of the Avon lies 
through a lonely mountain glen, the lower past tracts of 
cultivated land and between hill slopes covered with birch- 
copse, till it falls into the Spey below the old castle of 
Ballindalloch. 
From this short description of the basin and course of the 
Spey, it will be seen that the area under consideration 
presents a great variety of character and feature, and is, 
therefore, favourable to the presence of a large and varied 
avifauna. 
Thus we have the Alpine solitudes of the high Cairngorms, 
where the ptarmigan crouch among the stones and the 
eagle soars above the precipices; the rolling moorlands, 
home of the grouse, curlew, and golden plover; the birch- 
copses, oak-woods, and far-stretching pine-forests for the 
woodland birds; the marshy meadows, the haunt of water- 
fowl and waders; and the fertile haugh-lands and slopes of 
Banff and Moray for the birds of cultivation. 
One special feature of the Spey valley is the great differ- 
ence in the number of birds seen there, especially in the 
neighbourhood of the river, during the spring and early 
summer, and later in the year. In autumn the river 
will be silent and deserted except for one or two 
herons, and the cheery little dippers, flitting from stone 
to stone with their sweet fragment of song, or, perhaps, as on 
one occasion at Delfur, a kingfisher (a bird of rare occurrence 
so far north), passing like a jewelled arrow, with its swift 
darting flight, up into the thickets of a lonely back stream. 
But in the spring-time every shingle bed along the river is 
noisy with the shrill, harsh cry of the oyster-catchers, very 
striking in their black and white plumage, red bills and legs ; 
and there is heard the quavering whistle of the sandpiper, 
and the plaintive call of the ringed plover, a small colony of 
VoL. I. 7 
