THE BIRDS OF IONA AND MULL. 243 



GEESE. 



All the small isles which " guard famed Staffa round," inclusive 

 of itself, are the resort of innumerable wild geese, who select these 

 unfrequented localities for their winter quarters, for there they find 

 abundance of grass, and almost perfect immunity from the visits of 

 man. Even the very smallest of these islets support so many head of 

 cattle, according to their size. Staffa's regulation number is fourteen 

 or fifteen. These beasts are deposited in autumn and left to themselves 

 all winter, and when revisited in spring are "wild as the wild deer," 

 and both startle and are startled by the arrival of some hundred 

 tourists by the first Staffa and lona steamboat. All through the winter 

 these islands are almost entirely inaccessible, landing seldom being pos- 

 sible upon their sorely- vexed shores. Should a few days' break occur 

 in the ever-successive tempests w T hich roar over the Hebrides all winter, 

 such a short interval is not sufficient to let the scourged ocean quiet 

 down enough to permit a boat alongside their rocks. So it is very 

 rarely possible to disturb the geese in these their well-chosen places of 

 resort, and they must be watched and waited for when they sally forth 

 to make descents upon the larger islands, and what we call mainland. 

 I have, however, occasionally succeeded in effecting a landing and sur- 

 prising them on their own ground, at least some of them, for a boat 

 approaching an island is a very marked object, and the geese keep 

 streaming away in long strings all the time she keeps nearing it, and 

 those only remain which are on the other side of the island or lying in 

 a hollow, and these are what the landing party must hope to come 

 upon, as on them all their hopes depend ; for after the first shots have 

 been fired, all is over for that time, as it is impossible to linger on an 

 island where a swift-rising tempest may catch you and storm-stay you 

 beyond all hope of recovery for a week or a month. Judging from the 

 traces they leave behind them, the number of geese frequenting these 

 islands must be vastly great, and it is almost a wonder any grass is left 

 at all for the legitimate grazers. I have seen a futile attempt at 

 putting up a bodach, or scarecrow, which never deceives such a saga- 

 cious bird as the goose, nor does the man of straw long survive the 

 elementary wrath which is poured upon his battered crown. In this 

 part of the country geese are winter visitants only, and I have not 

 heard of their breeding or being seen in summer. Though there cannot 



