404 The Birds of Nairn, [Sess» 



much contracted in recent times through drainage, but still a 

 noisy rookery of Gulls in the breeding season, and reckoned by 

 Millais as a habitat and probable breeding-place of the Crested 

 Duck. But the area of most varied interest is that over 

 which Mr Charles St John, fifty years ago, delighted to wander 

 gun in hand — the tract of tidal sand, boggy heath, and sand- 

 dune which lies to the east of Nairn. On this flat you will find, 

 within a few hundred yards of each other, two sheets of brown 

 peaty water, Lochloy and Cran Loch, both bordered on the 

 seaward side by a broad and dense fringe of bulrush, sedge, 

 and bog-iris, which provides an ideal refuge and nesting-place 

 for Coots, Water-rails, Sedge- warblers, and all the tribe of shy 

 creatures that are never happy far from their base. At the 

 eastern extremity of the zone you have the Buckie Loch, now 

 a mere fraction of its former size, whilst in the interspaces of 

 these lochs there is a succession of bogs, shallow pools, low 

 dunes, thickets, and fir plantations till you come to the 

 howling waste of the Culbin Sands, in the depressions of 

 which you will find the chain of bogs and pools continued 

 more or less till you reach the Findhorn. 



Those who know something of the tastes and requirements 

 of birds will recognise that here you have a tract specially 

 designed and built by Nature to be the home of that vast 

 army of water-fowl, swimmers and waders, which she has 

 been pleased to create in such variety. A walk of half a mile 

 across the sands at ebb-tide will take you to a long, narrow 

 boulder-bank, some four miles in length and less than a 

 quarter of a mile at its greatest width — a peninsula at the ebb, 

 but an island at the flood — the home in the breeding season 

 of countless families of Tern. Here or hereabouts many 

 generations ago, when Culbin farms still yielded their crops 

 of corn and grass, the river Findhorn found its way into the 

 sea. How the foundations of the Old Bar were originally 

 laid I do not profess to know, but now that it is there its 

 defences are maintained and renewed by the waters of the 

 Firth, which in every great storm throw up and deposit on the 

 seaward side ridge after ridge of pebbles and boulders, ranging 

 from the size of a marble to that of a cannon-ball. And, 

 having built this nursery for her broods of sea-birds. Nature 

 farther, by way of protecting her offspring, proceeds with her 



