200 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS.  [caapr. xxv 
the course of a small unfrozen stream between my house and the 
river ; he then suddenly alighted on a post, and remained a short 
time motionless in the peculiar strange attitude of his kind, as if 
intent on gazing at the sky. All at once a new idea 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 mo- 
ment, and then rises into the air with a trout of about two inches 
long in his bill; this he carries quickly to the post 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 king- 
fisher 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 drop- 
ping 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 extraordinary 
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, avd before the slippery little fish (that 
glances about in the water like a silver arrow) can get out of 
reach, he is caught in the bill of the tern, and in a moment after- 
wards is either swallowed whole, or journeying rapidly through 
quite a new element to feed the young of his 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 
