266 NETHER LOCHABER, 



being anchored by its byssus to a tangle root (Laminaria digitata) 

 of immense size. The poor kittiwake had evidently been fairly 

 trapped : the case was clear. Walking along the beach at low- 

 water, in search of food, it must have stepped inadvertently and 

 unwittingly into the jaws, so to speak, of the open, or rather half- 

 open, mussel, which, in resentment of the intrusion, instantly 

 closing with a steel trap-like snap, held the poor bird firm and fast. 

 There was no chance or hope of escape, and the unfortunate little 

 gull, thus anchored to the bottom, was miserably drowned by the 

 advancing tide. Its body would, to a certain extent, act as a float 

 or buoy to the mussel and tangle root, which, thus loosened, the 

 storm would readily dislodge, and cast up on the beach, even as we 

 found it. Web-feet of all kinds are, of course, as liable to death 

 in all its forms, natural and accidental, as any other animals, but 

 we dare to say that in any accurate return of the vital statistics of 

 sea-birds, death by drowning, Ophelia-like, would be found about 

 the rarest. In more ways than one, therefore, was our dead kitti- 

 wake a curiosity of no every-day occurrence, though, in nineteen 

 cases out of twenty, the passer-by would probably be content to 

 kick it aside as a dead gull, and no more, if, indeed, he con- 

 descended to notice it at all. We were lately told an amusing story 

 about a Fort-William man who lived some fifty years ago, and was 

 in his day a great shore-searcher after storms, incited thereto, not 

 exactly in the interests of science, but by more mundane and 

 prosaic considerations. Summer and winter, all the year round, 

 he searched the shores (Bhi'dh e g'iarraidh nan dadaichan, was 

 the phrase) of Achintore and Drumarbin after every gale of wind, 

 wandering ghost-like in the grey dawn by the margin of the sea, 

 and diligently picking up every conceivable article of flotsam and 

 jetsam that came in his way. In all this there was perhaps 

 nothing to object to ; but this mild specimen of a Cornish wrecker 

 had the habit of appropriating, without compunction, such oars, 



