446 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



got ; but there do not appear to be many folks in the island 

 now who care to undertake the risk which climbing for it 

 on an extensive scale involves. One lad, however, informed 

 me that he and a companion had taken as many as forty a- 

 piece in one day in 1883. The young birds, which at one 

 stage of their existence are remarkably fat, are principally 

 sought for ; but the old ones too are taken when found in 

 the burrows. 



The numbers which annually repair to the cliffs of Eigg 

 to rear their young must be very considerable indeed. 

 Some time before we reached the island, dozen after dozen 

 passed our boat, flying seaward in rapid succession to a 

 rendezvous on the heaving waters, where they settled, form- 

 ing a dense flock, which, as it rose and fell, looked in the 

 distance not unlike a mass of great floating seaweed. The 

 flock must have consisted of many hundreds of birds. A 

 similar gathering, estimated at seven or eight hundred, many 

 of them birds of the year, were observed by Mr Gray riding 

 on the waves in the neighbourhood of Eigg in August 1877, 

 as recorded in the Society's Proceedings for Session 1877-78 

 (vol. iv., p. 213). 



The shearwaters breed principally, if not entirely, in 

 burrows, wherever sufficient soil is found, high up in the 

 precipitous crags which rise above the talus at a greater or 

 less distance from the shore, the rampart of black basalt sur- 

 rounding the bay of Laig being as formerly a favourite resort. 

 The spots likely to contain burrows are readily detected, even 

 at a distance, by the presence of an abundant vegetation, but 

 owing to the rotten nature of the rock composing the cliffs 

 to be ascended, or descended, as the case may be, before 

 these green spots can be reached, and the labour of digging 

 out the nests, the eggs are by no means easy to obtain. 

 According to Saxby ("The Birds of Shetland," p. 365) the 

 burrows are dug by the birds themselves, and vary " from 

 eighteen inches to two feet in depth, or even more, and are 

 so narrow that the introduction of the hand is a matter of 

 some difficulty when the hole happens to be new, and there- 

 fore but little worn by the passage of the bird." All the 

 burrows I examined, however, were from four to five or 



