CH. VII.] BIRDS ON SCOTCH SEA-LOCHS. 233 
true to the tastes of their adopted country, and 
seem rather to like it than otherwise. Tobacco- 
smoke they do not like, and if you could manage 
to keep a pipe constantly a-light, and your face 
turned due to windward, you would hardly require 
anything else. 
I remember a friend of mine one hot afternoon 
in August passing by a tent which we had set up 
in the hills on a moor in Ross-shire, and finding — 
a small boy, who had been left there to get dinner 
ready, sitting in the burn which ran by it, with 
only his head and hands above water, engaged in 
plucking a duck (ducking and plucking alter- 
nately), having been fairly hunted into it by the 
midges. 
From the way in which some of the lochs on 
the western coast of Scotland teem with animal 
life in the way of sea and shell-fish, one would 
naturally expect their shores to be tenanted in an 
equal degree by the birds which ordinarily live 
upon them. In this respect, however, I have been 
somewhat disappointed, those which one finds 
along the sides of such lochs being for the most 
part confined to Curlews, Herons, Oyster-catchers 
(which are, by the way, very good eating), and 
Ring Dotterel, none of them often appearing in any 
