genuine fieldfare’s egg taken by him from a nest of four in the Duchess of Sutherland’s park. The breeding of this bird in Scotland is a very rare occurrence which has not been recorded recently as far as I know.
When we returned to London from Shorncliffe in the autumn of 1865 I lived in my father’s house in Portman Square, and was fortunate enough to make friends with Mr. F.D. Godman, Lord Lilford and Mr. H.E. Dresser, all now keen ornithologists who had a few years previously founded at Cambridge the British Ornithologists’ Union, and who con- tributed to the pages of the Ibis papers which set the high standard of accuracy and thoroughness that have distinguished British ornithologists ever since. I became a member of the Union in 1866 and have belonged to it ever since. All its founders, except the brothers Godman, # have now departed, but their example and their work live, and it is largely owing to their influence that I continued my studies in ornithology, which certainly taught me a great deal that was afterwards most useful when I took up butterflies and plants. I now began to realise that Natural History had more pleasures for me than a military life. Every bit of leave I could get was spent in shooting and collecting.
In 1866 I paid my first visit to the island of Islay, staying there with a gamekeeper named Legg, who allowed me to shoot over a large area of land on which wildfowl were numerous, and there I killed five species of wild geese. In Loch Indail there were a good many brent geese which fed on the [1] which grows abundantly there, and there I had a narrow escape from drowning, owing to the capsizing of a boat whose rudder broke at a critical moment. Though encumbered with thick clothes and in a heavy surf, I just managed to struggle into water where I could touch bottom between the waves; but the boatman, who knew the depth better than I did, was so scared that he forgot the little English he knew, and I very nearly swam into deep water again before he warned me of my clanger. My gun I recovered at low tide two days afterwards, not much the worse for the salt water.
On a sandy island covered with bent, called Ardnave, a large flock of barnacle geese used to feed. I made a most successful stalk among the sand-hills, and got no less than nine with a right and left shot from a twelve - bore gun, the heaviest shot I ever made with a shoulder gun. But barnacles are the worst eating, as brent geese are the best, of all the species I have tried, and I never again fired a shot at them.
The Cornish chough was a very common bird at that time on the north side of Islay. It is the most graceful in its flight, and most pleasant in its cry, of all the crow tribe. It seems very strange that this bird, which in England is confined to a few localities on our southern and western coasts, should be so common in some of the high mountain regions of Europe and Asia, and that the Himalayan chough, which occurs at 12,000 to 15,000 feet above sea level, should differ so slightly from our native bird, though its environment is so different. Another bird that I found there was the
Both F. Du Cane Godman, President of the British Ornithologists’ Union, and
Percy Godman, who both received the Gold Medal presented to the four surviving
founders on the fiftieth anniversary of the Society, have since died: F.D. Godman
in 1919, and P.S. Godman in 1922.
- ↑ Zostera
