200 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. [CHAP. xxv. 



the course of a small unfrozen stream between my house and the 

 river ; he then suddenly alighted on a post, and remained a short 

 time motionless in the peculiar strange attitude of his kind, as if 

 intent on gazing at the sky. All at once a new idea comes into 

 his head, and he follows the course of the ditch, hovering here 

 and there like a hawk, at the height of a yard or so above the 

 water : suddenly down he drops into it, disappears for a mo- 

 ment, and then rises into the air with a trout of about two inches 

 long in his bill ; this he carries quickly to the post where he had 

 been resting before, and having beat it in an angry and vehement 

 manner against the wood for a minute, he swallows it whole. I 

 tried to get at him, coveting the bright blue feathers on his back, 

 which are extremely useful in fly-dressing, but before I was 

 within shot, he darted away, crossed the river, and sitting on a 

 rail on the opposite side, seemed to wait as if expecting me to 

 wade after him ; this, however, I did not think it worth while 

 doing, as the water was full of floating ice, so I left the king- 

 fisher where he was, and never saw him again. Their visits to 

 this country are very rare, I only have seen one other, and he 

 was sitting on the bow of my boat watching the water below 

 him for a passing trout small enough to be swallowed. 



The kingfisher, the terns, and the solan geese are the only birds 

 that fish in this way, hovering like a hawk in the air and drop- 

 ping into the water to catch any passing fish that their sharp 

 eyesight can detect. The rapidity with which a bird must move, 

 to catch a fish in this manner, is one of the most extraordinary 

 things that I know. A tern, for instance, is flying at about 

 twenty yards high suddenly he sees some small fish (generally a 

 sand-eel, one of the most active little animals in the world), 

 down drops the bird, and before the slippery little fish (that 

 glances about in the water like a silver arrow) can get out of 

 reach, he is caught in the bill of the tern, and in a moment after- 

 wards is either swallowed whole, or journeying rapidly through 

 quite a new element to feed the young of his captor. Often in 

 the summer have I watched flocks of terns fishing in this manner 

 at a short distance from the shore, and never did I see one 

 emerge after his plunge into the water without a sand-eel. 

 When I have shot at the bird as he flew away with his prey, I 

 have picked up the sand-eel, and there are always the marks of 



