Birds' -Nesting Season. 6 1 



But for Skuas, as for prouder potentates, " there is 

 no armour against fate." We brought home, as a 

 remembrance of an enjoyable day, the tail of one 

 which had bowed to higher power and been eaten by 

 a Hawk. 



The Great Skua, which is three times the size of 

 " Richardson's," breeds still on one or two of the 

 northern islands, and on Foula, but is every year 

 becoming scarcer. We did not see it ourselves in 

 the Shetlands, but in the autumn, a year or two 

 before, had fine opportunities of studying its habits, 

 and realising the appropriateness of its scientific 

 name, Lestris catarrhactes the pirate who makes his 

 descents with the dash of a waterfall when, in com- 

 pany with three yachts and humbler sea-fowl innu- 

 merable, one of these magnificent birds was driven by 

 stress of weather outside to run for shelter to Loch 

 Broom. 



The day after our visit to Noss, when on the point 

 of No-Ness, fifteen miles or so south, we were taken 

 to see a perforated rock, like a double arch of a sub- 

 merged cathedral, which for many years had been the 

 nesting-place of a pair of the Great Black-backed 

 Gulls, worse tyrants, if possible, than even the Skua. 

 The " Great Black-back " is a solitary bird, bearing, 

 " like the Turk, no brother near his throne," dreaded 

 and shunned by other birds, whose eggs and young 

 he destroys. 



Macaulay, minister of Ardnamurchan, and historian 

 of St. Kilda, a great uncle of the historian of the 

 larger neighbouring islands, writing in 1758, says : 



"It is hardly possible to express the hatred with which the 

 otherwise good-natured St. Kildans pursue these Gulls. If one 

 happens to mention them it throws their whole blood into a 

 ferment. If caught, they outvie one another in torturing this 



