Birds. 37 



The following incident may not be uninteresting as placing in a strik- 

 ing point of view the deficiency of courage displayed by this species, 

 when placed in opposition to the "majesty of man," even in its own 

 peculiar haunts. 



The sea eagle or erne is the only species, so far as I know, that 

 breeds in these islands. The golden eagle and osprey are occasion- 

 ally seen, but seem entitled to no higher rank than that of stragglers. 

 The erne itself is scarce, and from its breeding in the highest cliffs is 

 very seldom procured from the nest, while its extreme wariness makes 

 the shooting of it no easy matter. The Shetland cragsmen are proba- 

 bly among the most daring in the world; for unlike those of St. Kilda, 

 Faro, &c. who scale the precipices by the regularly organized assist- 

 ance of their companions, and with ropes and poles, the Shetlander 

 fearlessly scrambles through the dizzy cliffs alone, and without other 

 aid than is afforded him by the precarious holds he gets with his feet 

 and hands: when we consider this is frequently in the most moulder- 

 ing micaceous precipices, where the giving way of the fragment the 

 venturous climber may be trusting to, would precipitate him some 

 hundred feet on the rocks or into the ocean below, and when he has 

 often a bag of young birds or eggs attached to his body, we may well 

 say, as Shakspeare does of the samphire-gathering on the cliffs of 

 Dover — " dreadful trade ! " 



To return to the erne. For some years back a very expert and 

 daring fowler, Joseph Mathewson by name, had been in the habit of 

 annually robbing the nest of a pair of ernes,* which had, from time 

 immemorial, built on a ledge of rock perhaps 400 feet above the level 

 of the sea, on the north-west side of the island of Unst. This year 

 he had as usual ascended the cliff for that purpose, but finding only 

 two eggs (the erne always laying three, of which one is barren), which 

 he took, he returned after a few days to get the other, supposing it to 

 be then deposited. The eyrie was built on a tolerably broad ledge of 

 rock, and on coming up to one end of it, the nest being concealed 

 from him by an outstanding piece of rock, he was aware of the bird 

 being in it, by seeing its white tail projecting beyond the interposing 



* I may mention a curious circumstance which happened to him two or three years 

 ago, with the same pair of birds. On getting to the eyrie he found two young ones 

 in it, but thinking them too young to remove, he only took the odd eg^ always found, 

 intending to return in a few days for the young, which he did, but found that the old 

 birds had removed both nest and young to a considerable distance from the first place, 

 and on the other side of a deep creek or "gyo" as it is vernacularly termed, and their 

 it has remained ever since. 



