406 The Birds of Nairn, [Sess. 



make their way to their feediDg-ground with a round dozen of 

 woolly ducklings waddling in their wake. It is even worth 

 while to take off your shoes and give chase, if only to see how 

 completely, when the danger grows pressing, the young birds 

 will vanish from sight, although the shore seems to offer little 

 more cover, apparently, than you might find on a billiard- 

 table. 



The drier and more open and heathy parts of the littoral 

 area are the favourite feeding- and nesting-ground of the 

 Lapwing, a bird which is now certainly resident the year 

 through in this county, whatever it may have been in the 

 time of Mr Charles St John, who regards it as a visitor. But 

 though the seaboard rim is a favourite haunt of this bird, the 

 Lapwing is generally and evenly distributed throughout the 

 county. In spring and early summer there is not a heath, 

 scarcely a field, right up to the foothills, where these birds are 

 not to be found in greater or less numbers. Within the last 

 fifty years plantations of fir have grown up over considerable 

 areas of the sand -drifts, and now give shelter to wandering 

 flocks of sylvan birds — Tits, Wrens, and Siskins — as well as to 

 various Thrushes, Warblers, and Finches ; and if it be true that 

 birds gravitate to congenial food areas, as water to its level and 

 money to its market, we ought now to be within measurable 

 distance of the time when the Crossbill will be a familiar 

 presence in the Mavistown and Delnies woods. 



A too familiar shape along this littoral tract of sand is the 

 rabbit, which finds here ready to its use a medium sufficiently 

 compact and coherent for burrowing, and at the same time 

 dry, clean, and easily workable, and within a comfortable 

 distance of the farmer's turnip and clover fields. These 

 rabbit-burrows, however, are not an unmixed evil, inasmuch as 

 two interesting, though widely dissimilar, species appropriate 

 them for nesting purposes, the Shelduck and the Stockdove. 

 The partiality of the Shelduck for this part of the coast has 

 been already noted. The Stockdove is a comparatively recent 

 addition to the avifauna of Nairn, its arrival dating back some 

 twenty-five or thirty years. This pigeon is now quite common 

 along the coast on both sides of the town, and compensates to 

 some extent for certain regrettable losses to our bird-list in 

 recent years. 



