1 907-1908.] The Bird Life of an Outer Island, 15 



hunt, that it leads me to think that either the Peregrine rarely 

 strikes in the vicinity of the eyrie or familiarity has bred a 

 kind of fatalism among the rock-birds which renders them 

 phlegmatically indifferent to the comings and goings and kill- 

 ings of their aristocratic neighbours. 



But in spite of all this evidence of an eyrie, we still had 

 misgivings — so reluctant is a man to believe his good fortune 

 — as to its actual occupation. It was the 12th of June, and 

 a date when, by any number of precedents, the offspring of the 

 year should be gone from the eyrie ledge, if not from the care 

 and keeping of their parents. We could recall with only too 

 ready poignancy a day on an inner island when a pair of ex- 

 cited parents had enticed us into searching half a mile of cliffs, 

 and given us no greater recompense for our pains and perspir- 

 ation than a distant view of two well-feathered young Peregrines 

 perched on unreachable crags, quite obviously out of the eyrie 

 and at large, but quite as obviously still under the vigilant 

 eye of the old birds. This was the state of affairs we sus- 

 pected here, but all our scanning of what was visible of the 

 cliff from the summit brought us no further enlightenment. 

 It was plain we must get lower down, and C, to do him jus- 

 tice, had advocated this policy from the beginning. He did 

 not wait now for a plan of campaign to be formulated, but 

 recklessly put himself over the edge of the precipice and 

 disappeared. My brother and I perforce, if a trifle more 

 cautiously and gingerly, followed suit, and for a long time — so 

 it seemed, it may have been twenty minutes — we were scour- 

 ing this great weather-beaten rampart of gneiss, seeking routes 

 upward and downward, searching for coigns of vantage from 

 which we might gauge a Peregrine's likes and dislikes, groping 

 for castings or down — (unlike the Sparrow-hawk, the Peregrine 

 rarely leaves any of this about her nest) — or any morsel 

 which might guide us to the nesting ledge. Very early I got 

 ensnared among a jumble of loose rocks, which had been taken 

 possession of by a resplendent colony of Shags, and extrication 

 was still baffling me when the cry came up that the eyrie was 

 found. Strangely enough I got out of my difficulties immedi- 

 ately, and under C.'s pilotage — all honour to him — presented the 

 third and last beaming countenance before two young Falcons. 



It was a typical Peregrine abode, situated about eighty or 



