1 907-1908.] The Bird Life of an Outer Island. 5 



guards the morsel of land which he is striving to wrest from 

 the sand and the salt winds and to harness to the will and 

 needs of man. Away from the fertile hollows, almost the 

 only birds well distributed over the island were the Meadow 

 Pipit, the Wheatear, and the Starling — the latter perhaps 

 gradually making himself master. There were also, but less 

 abundantly, the Skylark and the Twite ; on the cliffs we saw 

 one or two Wrens, and among the lower rocks there were 

 Kock Pipits. 



The land bird which interested us most was the Purple 

 Sandpiper. This bird, as you are doubtless well aware, is a 

 common winter visitor to our shores, and its appearance in 

 midsummer in what seemed to be breeding plumage almost 

 inevitably whetted our curiosity. Our eagerness to see more 

 of it than a casual glance afforded was stimulated also by 

 some slight acquaintance with previous records of the Purple 

 Sandpiper's occurrence, and with the reports — the strong pre- 

 sumptive evidence as the late Mr Saunders called it — of its 

 having bred within the confines of the British Isles. A famous 

 Scottish naturalist saw and shot Purple Sandpipers on one of 

 these islands on 27th May away back in 1870, but the birds 

 he observed appear to have been near the eastern shore, the 

 natural and expected resort of such migrants in the winter, 

 and consequently also of those non- breeding birds which 

 continue to linger on during the summer. But where we 

 saw Purple Sandpipers, and where alone we saw them, was 

 right up near the summit, on the western slopes of the highest 

 hill — a stony, sparsely grown stretch of ground, becoming as 

 it neared the edge of the cliffs almost entirely bare ; and it 

 was their position here which first inspired within us a tiny 

 hope that they might have stayed to breed. Saxby — a 

 reliable man in many ways — in his ' Birds of the Shetlands,' 

 averred confidently that the Purple Sandpipers which re- 

 mained during the summer in this country retired regularly 

 from the shores to the higher ground for breeding purposes, 

 and that eggs had been brought to him from these same hills 

 which he had no hesitation in pronouncing to be genuine 

 specimens of Purple Sandpipers' eggs. Ornithologists, how- 

 ever, are a sceptical race, except where their own observations 

 are concerned, and this latter piece of information has been 



