ERNE. 9 
and after a greater or less exercise of patience, is rewarded 
by the approach of the Eagle, attracted to its quarry, either 
by its own immediate perceptions, or from its following other 
birds attracted to it by the exercise of theirs. The ravens, 
crows, and sea-gulls have preceded him to the repast, but his 
arrival, harpy like, at once disperses them; the tables are 
turned, and they are compelled at first to withdraw to a 
respectful distance while he regales himself. But when he 
himself has become a carrion, laid low by the deadly aim of 
the ambuscade, it falls again to their lot to finish at leisure 
the feast which so lately he had disturbed; perhaps even to 
make a second course of his own defunct body. Mr. Macgillivray 
says that he has known no fewer than five of these birds 
destroyed in this manner by a single shepherd in the course 
of one winter, and he also says that in the Hebrides, where 
a small premium, a hen, I believe, from each house, or each 
farm-house in the parish, is given for every Eagle killed, as 
many as twenty fall victims every year. 
The same motive which prompts to the destruction of the 
parent birds, leads also to various ‘hair-breadth ’scapes’ in 
attempts to destroy their young. By means of ropes, the 
attacking party is lowered over the edge of some awful-looking 
precipice, some ‘imminent deadly’ crag—for it is only in the 
most secure retreats that the Erne builds, conscious, as 1t would 
seem, of the odium under which he lives, and the proclamation 
of outlawry which has been made against him in consequence 
—and having taken dry heather and a match with him, sets 
fire to the nest, and both it and its tenants are consumed 
before the gaze of the bereaved parents. Sometimes the eyrie 
can be approached and destroyed without the aid of ropes, by 
the experienced and adventurous climbers, who, habituated to 
the perils of those stupendous cliffs, make little of descents and 
ascents which would infallibly turn dizzy the heads of those 
who have only been accustomed to ‘terra firma.’ 
This bird is the perpetual object of the buffets of the raven 
and the skua gull, of whom he seems to be in the greatest 
dread. It is indeed related that the latter does not exercise 
this hostility in the Hebrides, but that it does in the Shetland 
Islands; but I cannot understand how one individual bird, 
and still less how a colony of birds, can be gifted with an 
instinct not possessed by a colony of its own Here in the 
same region. 
In prowling for food near the ocean, the Erne - generally 
