THE RAVEN. 169 



congregate from all parts. The Raven is the first to find out a 

 dead sheep among the hills. He begins his feast by picking out 

 the eyes, and afterwards the tongue if he can easily get at it; the 

 perinoeum is next attacked, and lastly the abdomen, from which 

 he drags out the intestines and devours them. When a horse 

 dies, from thirty to fifty soon gather about him, and continue to 

 make daily visits until the bones are picked. The Raven wages a 

 kind of distant war with the eagle, two of them generally harassing 

 the latter bird when it appears in the neighbourhood of their abode, 

 on which account Ravens are never shot by the islanders during 

 the breeding season. When a Raven has lost his mate during this 

 season, even after the young ones are far advanced, he is observed 

 to procure a stepmother for them with great celerity." * 



Over the whole of the district to which this quotation refers 

 namely, from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis these disreputable 

 thieves are still, as they must then have been, looked upon with 

 great dislike; yet to the naturalist the sight of a pair of Ravens 

 hieing to their rocky perch far above the sterile heath, is one not 

 without interest. Frequently when seated on a hill near Loch- 

 maddy, overlooking half of the island of North Uist, I could not 

 help being arrested by the sable couple appearing at first like two 

 dim specks in the evening sky, and, as they gradually neared their 

 destination, holding a hoarse talking with each other, as if chuckling 

 over the mischief they had been doing. Audible at a great dis- 

 tance, this croak of theirs was the only sound I heard for some 

 minutes; but after the birds had passed overhead, and their con- 

 versation had died away in the distance, leaving the stillness of 

 this waste of rocks and water more irksome than before, I thought 

 of Macgillivray's impressions when similarly situated, and the 

 somewhat uncomplimentary strain in which he has compared the 

 animate with the inanimate in this most singular group of 

 islands : 



"The character of the Raven accords well with the desolate aspect 

 of the rugged glens of the Hebridean moors. He and the eagle are the 

 fit inhabitants of those grim rocks ; the red grouse, the plover, and 

 its page, of those worn and scarred heaths ; the ptarmigan of those 

 crags and tempest-beaten summits. The red-throated diver and 

 the merganser, beautiful as they are, fail to give beauty to those 



* Edin. Jour. Nat. and Geog. Science, 1830, vol. ii., p. 322. 



