president's addeess. 521 



years the bird will be extinct. Probably in this case, the keepers 

 may act conscientiously in destroying poor Mag, for sooth to say 

 he is fond of eggs and young game ; but sometimes they have 

 less excuse for their destruction of the /era naturm. In 1860 I 

 spent some weeks in Sutherlandshire, and was much surprised 

 at not seeing a single eagle, though wandering through the wildest 

 of the land. I remarked upon it to a keeper who accompanied 

 me on a morning's walk. "Ah!" he said, "we get forty shil- 

 lings a head for them." "But," said I, " they don't do much 

 harm, do they?" "Oh no," says he, "not half so much as 

 these hoody crows, which watch the sheep where they are thrown 

 on their backs in a furrow, pick out their eyes, and wait till they 

 die, to eat them at leisure. The eagles live chiefly on the blue 

 hares, which are as much vermin as rabbits in England, and on 

 very rare occasions carry off a lamb. But we get forty shillings 

 a head for them!" 



The Fearn Islands have been familar to me for nearly fifty 

 years, and the successful preservation of the sea fowl upon them 

 has been a source of much gratification to me, as it must have 

 been to all feeling men. Nevertheless, several kinds of fowl, 

 have I believe, disappeared from them and from the neighbour- 

 hood. About the year 1880, the little tern bred abundantly in a 

 recess in the high sandy sea bank between Bamborough Castle 

 and Holy Island ; at that time I found more than a dozen eggs 

 laid on the fiat sandy and gravelly floor of this dry bay, into 

 which, on rare occasions, the tide seemed to flow ; and I might 

 have got many more, as there were, I dare say, forty or fifty 

 pairs of old birds flying about. It has long ceased to breed 

 there. The green cormorant or shag at that time, and for ten 

 years later, bred sparingly in the deep gulley of the rock, oppo- 

 site the pinnacles on the Fearns. I looked in vain for it a 

 few years since. 



The shell-drake also, which made its nest in the rabbit holes 

 on Holy Island then, has, I suspect, also disappeared. 



Some twenty years since, a few pahs of the Dotterel were 

 annually shot on Newcastle Town Moor, about the third week 

 in April ; on their way, probably, to the Cumberland Mountains 



