The following incident may not be uninteresting as placing in a striking 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 occasionally 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 probably among the most daring in the world; for unlike those of St. Kilda, Faro, &c. who scale the precipices by the regularly organized assistance 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 mouldering 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,[1] 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, hut thinking them too young to remove, he only took the odd egg 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 there it has remained ever since.
