190 THE MOOR AND THE LOCH. 



braes, the bird most likely was a male sparrow-hawk. Three 

 of their nests were found by my watcher one spring, all fixed 

 in stunted trees, the spontaneous growth of " dells without a 

 name," in the midst of my best partridge breeding-ground. 

 We trapped the old male and female of two of these nests, and 

 actually caught the third pair; but the female escaped by 

 accidentally dropping a thrush she was feeding the young with 

 between the jaws of the trap, which prevented them from hold- 

 ing while the trap that caught the male, unfortunately had 

 a weak spring. After this warning, neither of course would 

 return. 



It is well understood by preservers of game that one hoodie- 

 crow, or even a magpie, will destroy more grouse in the egg 

 than a dozen eagles will do when they are fully fledged. On 

 Kames and North Bute there were certainly far fewer black, 

 and especially grey crows, than are generally met with on the 

 west coast islands. We only discovered four nests in the season 

 of 1862, built as usual on the top boughs of tall trees, or on the 

 stumps of bushes growing out of the face of a beetling cliff. We 

 trapped or poisoned the old couples of all the nests but one, 

 placed far down in an inaccessible precipice. Two of these 

 pairs were royston and carrion crows breeding together. In 

 both cases the females were black, and the males grey. They 

 had built in fir and oak trees, but the two couple which had 

 nestled in the cliffs overhanging the sea were all grey roystons. 



The number of magpies was so prodigious in North Bute 

 that I often wondered how any lowland winged game had 

 been raised at all. With trap and poison we massacred 

 eighteen couple of old birds, each pair having a nest full of 

 eggs or young ! Jesse, in his ' Gleanings,' mentions a know- 

 ing bird-dealer who affirmed that there were two species of 

 magpie. The smaller kind, which he termed " the bush 

 magpie," always built in bushes or hedgerows, while the 

 larger ones chose the tops of high slender trees. By far the 

 greater proportion of those destroyed by me that spring had 



