20 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF ABERDEEN AND DISTRICT 
IV. 
ANIMAL LIFE OF NORTH-EAST 
SCOTLAND 
BY 
Pror. JAMES RITCHIE, M.A., D.Sc. 
THE CHARACTER OF THE District—On December 2, some years ago, 
three guns out shooting for the day in Aberdeenshire are reported to 
have killed the following twenty-two kinds of animals : pheasant, partridge, 
woodcock, snipe, mallard, golden eye, pochard, tufted duck, ring-dove, 
brown hare, rabbit, curlew, golden plover, green plover, dunlin, little 
stint, purple sandpiper, turnstone, redshank, moorhen, water rail and 
coot. That typifies the character of the fauna (as well as of the human 
population)—the district may not produce many record bags, but it 
affords good mixed shooting. And the reason is a simple one, that 
within a limited area there is presented the utmost diversity of environ- 
ment; from muddy estuaries, frequented during the winter by many 
ducks and waders from Arctic regions, and shore-cliffs and sand-dunes 
tenanted by multitudes of breeding birds during the summer, to some 
of the highest mountains in the kingdom ; from the bare flat lands of 
Buchan to the primeval pine forests of upper Deeside. So that just as 
the district is a multum in parvo of scenic diversity, so the fauna represents 
a compendium of the fauna of the country as a whole. Nevertheless the 
North-east has some interests of its own. 
DEESIDE, THE Kry To THE NortH.—The north of Scotland is isolated 
from the south country by the Grampian Range and the mountains of 
northern Perthshire and south-western Inverness-shire, a barrier sufficient 
to check the spread of most low-country animals. But the barrier is 
breached by several passes which debouch upon the Dee valley, and it 
may be circumvented by way of the low land bordering the North Sea 
to the south of Aberdeen. By these passes every invading army of men 
has endeavoured to penetrate to the north, and by these passes the post- 
glacial animals, which already tenanted the first-inhabited lands to the 
south, must have pushed forward to occupy the north lands, left 
uninhabited upon the retreat of the ice-sheets. Since, from these far-off 
days till now, the coastwise and low-valley routes have offered the easiest 
and indeed the only available passage for most animals, it is within close 
mark of the truth to say that the ancestors of almost all the animals 
(excluding aerial forms) that now exist or have existed in northern Scotland 
ste at one time or other have found their way thither across the waters 
of Dee. 
In the earliest days of colonisation, in a late inter-glacial or in the 
