262 THE BIRDS OF IONA AND MULL. 



affect our coasts for breeding purposes. I have now dwelt at sufficient 

 length upon the how-to-catch your cormorant. I must now say a word 

 of how to deal with him when caught. There seems an extraordinary 

 prejudice against him as an article of food very ungrounded. In 

 little, old-fashioned books on birds, such passages are common as, 

 "The cormorant is the most offensively rank of all the feathered 

 creation. Even the Greenlanders, who consider rancid blubber and 

 train oil a luxury, refuse to eat the flesh of the cormorant as too dis- 

 gusting." Now, from many years' experience, corroborated by my 

 most fastidious friends and bon-vivants, who have tried the experiment, 

 I aver that a couple of scarts are equal to a good plump hare. As a 

 proof of this, I have heard a gentleman of property in the islands say 

 to his gamekeeper, "Donald, the mistress expects a friend to dinner 

 to-day, so you must bring home a hare or a couple of scarts." And I 

 have proceeded to help him in his mission by accompanying him in a 

 boat and landing him on a sea rock, where he remained concealed, 

 while I took the boat away to a little distance. A scart would soon 

 come flying past, and be duly knocked over ; this was picked up and 

 stuck upright on the summit of the rock with the aid of a few sticks 

 as props, and now a continual succession of scarts would be decoyed in 

 their flight past to hover over their unconscious comrade within range 

 of the concealed guns. In this way we soon got as many as we re- 

 quired, and divided the spoil to take home. The scarts should now be 

 hung for a week or more, according to the weather, then skinned, and 

 treated exactly like a hare, for making that pride of the Scottish 

 cuisine hare soup. Any good recipe for making this should be 

 exactly followed. 



THE SOLAN GOOSE. 



Only appears from time to time in considerable parties, which 

 remain fishing in our neighbourhood for a longer or shorter period, 

 according to their success in fishing. A party of gannets actively at 

 work fishing is a very beautiful sight, especially in the slanting rays 

 of an evening sun, which illumines the magnificent stretch of their 

 vast pinions, and flash upon the white spurt of foam which dashes up, 

 like the ricochet of a cannon ball, as the bird makes his plunge of forty 

 or sixty feet, like a shining meteor or white thunderbolt dropping from 

 the sky. Though unquestionably the noblest of our water-fowl, not 

 even excepting the swan, yet he is of no value for the pot. It is the 



