IN THE HIGHLANDS 55 



beautifully plucked by the parent eagles as any well- 

 trained kitchen-maid could have done. 



I had often heard that shepherds made great use of 

 eagles* nests to fill their larders, and my uncle cor- 

 roborates as follows : " Eagles sometimes built where 

 not even a rope-dancer could get at them — a sad case for 

 shepherds, who were accused of concealing the where- 

 abouts of their nests when in accessible places. It was 

 said that they tethered the eaglets to the nest long after 

 they could fly, because until the young birds left the nest 

 the parents never ceased to bring quantities of all sorts of 

 game to feed them, quite half of which was said to go 

 to the shepherds' larder. A shepherd admitted to me 

 that he once took a salmon quite fresh out of a white- 

 tailed eagle's nest. Fawns, hares, lambs, and grouse 

 were brought in heaps to the nest for months — an agree- 

 able variety at the shepherd's daily dinner of porridge 

 and potatoes and milk." 



We also made expeditions seawards to Eilean Fuara 

 and the Staca Buidh (Yellow Stack). My pet terrier 

 Deantag (Nettle) was the first in my time to discover 

 the stormy petrels nesting in large numbers in the cracks 

 of the dry, peaty soil. None of the natives had been 

 aware of this fact, because the petrels when breeding 

 never show themselves in the daytime. Fuara thus 

 became quite famous among ornithologists, but of later 

 years steam drifters have been in the habit of leaving 

 their herring-nets stretched out on the island for days 

 to dry, and that finished the poor little " stormies," 

 which, like so many other birds, have disappeared. 



This is what my uncle says about stormy petrels in 



