A Sportsman and Naturalist's Tour in Sutherlandshire

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 Excerpt: ...chiefly on the dead fish and other animal substances which are cast up by the sea on these lonely and rugged shores, and seldom attacking the lambs of the farmer to the same extent as the golden eagle does. Although it is frequently seen, and its sharp bark-like cry is heard far inland, the usual hunting-ground of the sea-eagle is along the shore, where it can feed on its foul prey, undisturbed and unseen by human eye for months together. Like the golden eagle, this bird sometimes so gorges itself with food as to become helpless, and if then met with, may be knocked down by a stick, or captured alive before it can rise from the ground--a sad and ignoble fate for the king of birds! After all, the eagle is but a sorry representative of royalty and kingly grandeur: for although his flight is noble and magnificent, and his strength and power astonishing, there is a cruelty and treachery aliout the disposition of the bird which render it unfit to be educated and trained like the peregrine and other falcons; nor docs it ever become attached to its keeper. On the 28th of September the last house-swallow took his departure from this neighbourhood, although the season was so fine that there were several nests of young greenfinches about the garden even so late as the 30th of the month, and a wood-pigeon was sitting on its eggs in an ash tree close to the house. During the latter weeks of the fishing season (which legally ends on the 15th of September in all the northern rivers), the lower pools of the Findhornare full of an excellent small sea-trout, locally called the linnock. My opinion is that the finnock is the grilse, or young of the common sea-trout, bearing exactly the same relation and affinity to that fish as the grilse does to the salmon; but ...