CHAPTER II
ORNITHOLOGY: THE HEBRIDES: TURKEY
I suppose that I inherited a taste for Natural History from my Norfolk grandparents, for Norfolk has always been a great county for Natural History. On my grandfather’s property at Congham the last Great Bus¬ tards in Britain laid their eggs, and when a boy I used to hear my great- aunt, Miss Hamond, tell of seeing a flock of sixteen together on Massing - ham Heath. It was natural that a love of birds should have been my earliest interest in life. In those days all country boys went bird-nesting, and at my first school near Tunbridge Wells, as I have related, it was our greatest joy. There was then no sentiment about taking eggs, as many as possible, and the rarer the birds the more ruthless one was in hunting for them. When I went to Eton I had already the nucleus of a collection. At home, in the Easter holidays, I used to accompany the old Norfolk keeper when plover egging, and learnt how to watch birds without being seen by them. Before I left Eton at sixteen I knew the correct Latin name of every reputed British bird.
In April, 1865, before going up for the Army examination, I made my first independent expedition to collect birds in company with Mr. A. Crichton. We went to Stromness in Orkney and lodged with J.H. Dunn, the ornithologist, who collected birds and eggs for sale. In those days the railway only went as far as Dingwall, the remainder of the journey to Thurso being done on the last mail coach attended by a red-coated mail guard, who told me that he had been gradually driven north by the railway, and was the last survivor of this service of the Post Office in that capacity. At Stromness I went out shooting in a small boat with Dunn whenever the weather allowed, and used to think that he was over cautious about the weather. But the strong tides and winds in Scapa Flow made boating more hazardous than I then thought, and we had one or two near shaves of being swamped. Dunn, with another companion, was drowned from his own boat some years afterwards on one of these excursions.
On days too windy to shoot on the water I skinned the birds we shot, some of which are now stuffed in my hall. Velvet scoters, long-tailed ducks, eider ducks, mergansers, purple sandpipers, and a Solan goose are among them. The Solan goose, as he fell, disgorged a freshly caught herring, which when cooked was much better eating than the soft cod which was our daily repast, with eggs and bacon and tough mutton chops —about the only fresh food we got.
I began to make notes on birds, some of which are still of interest. Among others I find one on the Sclavonian grebe, which is a regular winter visitor from the north, and remains in some numbers as late as the end of April, when I saw as many as twenty in company. A few pairs no doubt remain and were found breeding in some small shallow hill lochs in Inverness- shire.
I received from A.W. Clarke, Esq., of Meddart, Ross-shire, some eggs
among which were a white-tailed eagle’s egg taken at Whiten Head; also a
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