90 . MISS CONSTANCE A. HINXMAN ON 
which is established every here and there. The marshy 
meadows are thronged with breeding waders; redshanks, 
snipe, and green plover; and on the hills and moorlands are 
dunlin, curlew, and golden plover, most of whom will be 
gone again by the end of August or early September. 
Another notable point of the bird-life on Spey-side is the 
number of black-headed gulls which live there during a 
great part of the year, forming nesting colonies, numbering 
from a few pairs to several hundreds. 
The largest of these colonies is found at the Boggach, a 
marshy pool between Loch Alvie and the Spey. It is a 
beautiful spot. On one hand rises the steep craggy side of 
Tor Alvie, hung with feathery birches, on the other, a dark 
pine-wood. The air is filled with clouds of circling, screaming 
gulls, that at a distance appear like snowflakes against the 
blue sky. Their nests are crowded together on floating islands 
of sedge; while in the clear spaces between swim numbers 
of coots and a few teal and mallard. These so-called black- 
headed gulls (the head is not really black, but sooty-brown) 
are one of the very few species of birds which would not be 
the worse for a little judicious thinning of their numbers. 
During the comparatively dry summer of 1895, the old birds 
were hard put to it to find food for their young ones, many of 
whom must have died of starvation. One fully fledged 
young gull was picked up dead, and absolutely skin and bone, 
Special mention has been made of Rothiemurchus in the 
title of this paper, and there are one or two matters of in- 
terest more particularly belonging to this locality. The 
most important of these, though also the best known, is the 
fact that on the ruined wall of the old castle on the island 
in Loch-an-Eilein is the last, or nearly the last, home of the 
osprey (or fishing eagle) in this country. Those who have 
read Mr Harvie Brown’s Fawna of Moray will be familiar 
with his exhaustive history of the ospreys in Rothiemurchus 
and Glenmore. For the benefit of others, it may be men- 
tioned that, after breeding more or less continuously in the 
Glenmore and Rothiemurchus forests, at first in one or other 
of the old pine-trees, and later, after the nest had been 
several times disturbed, on the island, from the first recorded 
observation in 1824 to the year 1888, a historic battle took 
