228 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS chap. 



comes into his head, and he follows the course of the ditch, 

 hovering here and there like a hawk, at the height of a yard or 

 so above the water : suddenly down he drops into it, disappears 

 for a moment, and then rises into the air with a trout about 

 two inches long in his bill ; this he carries quickly to the po^t 

 where he had been resting before, and having beat it in an 

 angry and vehement manner against the wood for a minute, he 

 swallows it whole. I tried to get at him, coveting the bright 

 blue feathers on his back, which are extremely useful in fly- 

 dressing, but before I was within shot, he darted away, crossed 

 the river, and sitting on a rail on the opposite side, seemed to 

 wait as if expecting me to wade after him ; this, however, I 

 did not think it worth while doing, as the water was full of 

 floating ice, so I left the kingfisher where he was, and never 

 saw him again. Their visits to this country are very rare — I 

 only have seen one other, and he was sitting on the bow of my 

 boat watching the water below him for a passing trout small 

 enough to be swallowed. 



The kingfisher, the terns, and the solan geese are the only 

 birds that fish in this way, hovering like a hawk in the air and 

 dropping into the water to catch any passing fish that their 

 sharp eyesight can detect. The rapidity with which a bird 

 must move, to catch a fish in this manner, is one of the most 

 extraordinai-y things that I know. A tern, for instance, is flying 

 at about twenty yards high — suddenly he sees some small fish 

 (generally a sand-eel, one of the most active little animals in 

 the world), — down drops the bird, and before the slippery little 

 fish (that glances about in the water like a silver arrow) can 

 get out of reach, it is caught in the bill of the tern, and in a 

 moment afterwards is either swallowed whole, or journeying 

 rapidly through quite a new element to feed the young of its 

 captor. Often in the summer have I watched flocks of terns 

 fishing in this manner at a short distance from the shore, and 

 never did I see one emerge after his plunge into the water 

 without a sand-eel. When I have shot at the bird as he flew 

 away with his prey, I have picked up the sand-eel, and there 

 are always the marks of his bill in one place, just behind the 

 head, where it seems to be invariably caught. 



The terns which breed in the islands on a loch in the woods 

 of Altyre, fully five miles in a straight line from where they 



