158 A HUNDRED YEARS 



Inn of Lord Huntingfield and a Mr. Corrance — both, 

 I think, from Sufiolk — ^the first egg-collectors who ever 

 came to this country ! Hearing of the ospreys, they 

 made at once for the loch, where the nest was built on 

 the top of a high stack of rock rising sheer out of the 

 water. Their valet swam out, and returned with the 

 two eggs safely in his cap, which he held between his 

 teeth. 



I flattered myself for some time that I was the first 

 to find in Britain, or at any rate in Scotland, a goosander's 

 nest with eggs, and that was in an island in the 

 Fionn Loch, but afterwards I heard that a Cambridge 

 professor maintained he had found one in Perthshire 

 prior to my discovery. 



A few pairs of black-throated divers still float about 

 on our lochs, and sometimes rear their young, but sad to 

 say they are diminishing in numbers, and many lochs 

 where they used never to fail to breed are now without 

 these beautiful and most interesting summer tenants. 

 The red-throated divers, which I can quite well re- 

 member nesting on a small loch near the Fionn Loch, 

 and also on lochs in the Rudha Reidh point, have been 

 quite extinct for close on seventy years. 



The islands in the Fionn Loch, with its heronry and 

 the lands surrounding it, both the high hills and the flat 

 moors, were once upon a time good sporting grounds. 

 The late Viscount Powerscourt hired the stalking of the 

 great Fisherfield sheep-farm, just the year before the 

 sheep stock was taken off it, and had a grand time among 

 the stags. Having noticed, when stalking one day, the 

 number of blue hares on little Beinn a Chaisgean, on the 



