1 907-1908.] The Bird Life of an Outer Island. 3 



hopeless and forsaken a patch of land as a man could well 

 conceive of; from our standpoint — the standpoint of men 

 fresh from the " cribbing, cabining, confining " process of 

 modern business, eager to escape the Bastille of town civil- 

 isation, with no ambitions for the moment higher than the 

 study of sea-fowl — it is a hunting and camping ground unsur- 

 passed in all the wild territory of Western Scotland. Here 

 if anywhere a man may have freedom — here are no restrictions 

 of proprietors, here no restraints of law and order, here he 

 may throw the trammels and conventions of society to the 

 winds and learn, as Skelton says, that civilisation is only a 

 bad habit which we may expect to outgrow. And if he goes, 

 as we have gone, courting adventure and the stress of primi- 

 tive living, Gaelicless, provisionless, except for a quantity of 

 sweets and tobacco, it is no straight and easy way of exist- 

 ence, but a whole-hearted, hand-to-mouth, savage life, needing 

 all the wit and craft of the hunter to maintain it. It is no 

 part of my business to dilate on this. Briefly, there are 

 fish — a black host of saithe and lythe — seething round the 

 base of the rocks for those who care to take them out ; and 

 there are sea-fowl in tens of thousands on the cliffs for those 

 who care to capture them. Having an inherent disinclin- 

 ation to starve, and a modicum of Sassenach energy and 

 ingenuity, we fished and fowled daily. Fowling as an art and 

 as the mainstay of life is practically extinct in this island, as 

 it is in almost every other bird-island in Scotland with the 

 exception of St Kilda, and although sporadic expeditions to 

 the rocks are still made by unusually active natives, I am 

 afraid it must soon be counted, even in this remote corner, 

 among the pursuits of the past. The method at present most 

 favoured on the island — mainly I think because of its free- 

 dom from risks — is so utterly simple and yet so laborious 

 and uncertain, as compared with the devices employed in 

 the Faroes and Iceland, that it is not difficult to understand 

 how little the inventive genius has been developed in the 

 Celt. This method consists in taking advantage of a good 

 breeze, and in using a long pole — a caber — on the summit of 

 the cliffs to knock down the birds as they are driven inland, 

 or as they fight their way out again in the teeth of the wind 

 to reach the nesting ledges. We were never able to master 



