Sea-Fowl—Weather Prognostics— Goosander (Mergus
Merganser ,
Linn.)—Gales of Wind— January Primroses— Lachlan
Gorach,
the Mull "Natural"—A Dancing Rhyme.
"When a
prophet's vaticinations are verified by the event, the world rarely
fails to he reminded of it; when it is otherwise, however; when the
vaticinations turn out to he the very reverse of true, people are rarely
ever troubled with a note on the matter, least of all on the part of the
disappointed vaticinator himself. The fact is that everything like
vaticination had better, as a rule, be let alone; sooner or later, and
in nine cases out of ten, or oftener, the prophet never fails to come to
grief. So convinced, for our own part, are Ave of this, that while
reserving our right to vaticinate and predict as much and as recklessly
as anybody else, when it so pleased us, yet, as a matter of fact, we
never do venture further into the treacherous territories of
vaticination than the mere outskirts, so to speak, of what may well be
called the debateable land of weather prognostics;
and even there we tread as gingerly and cautiously as if at this moment Ave Avereon
the banks of the Prah, in constant dread of a lurking ambuscade of
fierce and fetish-valorous Ashantees. Our weather prophecies
from time to time have often, as the courteous reader may remember, been
fully justified by the event; but if the whole truth
is to be told, we fear Ave must
confess that they have almost as frequently turned out to be wrong, and
it is not every weather prophet who will
confess so much. It requires a larger share of magnanimity than the
reader is perhaps aware of, to be able to confess one's errors with
anything like complaisance, even in such a matter as weather
prognostics, and we therefore trust that the following confession will
he valued as it ought. Some time ago the number of Arctic sea-fowl in
our creeks and hays, and the near approach of a rather early fall of
snow to the sea line, justified us, as we thought, in predicting an
early and severe winter, meaning by "severe"—for we scorn to be
disingenuous in the matter—that it was likely to be excessively cold as
well as unusually stormy. The experience of upwards of twenty years,
during which we have been a keen and close student of meteorological
phenomena and wild-bird life, seemed to us to warrant the conclusion at
which we had arrived. But how at mid-winter stands the fact? Why, thus:
that up to this date [January 1874], it has been, upon the whole, the "openest"
and mildest season for at least a quarter of a century ! How, then,
about your Arctic sea-birds ? the reader may exclaim, and we can only
answer that their presence so early and in such numbers is to be
accounted for by the almost incessant gales that have been sweeping over
the Atlantic and northern seas, with such disastrous effects, for nearly
two months past. Feeling the first blast of the approaching tempest, and
assured of its prolonged continuance by a marvellous instinct, further
and more correctly prescient of such matters than man, with all his
boasted science, they fled to the shelter of our, to them in such cases,
Friendly Islands; for an Arctic web-foot dreads an unusual severity of
hyperborean storms, long continued, quite as much as it dreads an
excessive intensity of hyperborean cold, and for the same reason—both
equally interfere with the allotted comforts of its economy and due
supply of food. The winter, besides, is not yet past; whistling before
one is fairly out of the wood is proverbially foolish, and there is,
after all, time enough yet betwixt this and the vernal equinox for the
advent of any amount of cold, so that there is still a chance for our
wild-bird friends and ourselves standing higher in the reader's
estimation as weather prophets, ere the winter is ended, than we do at
present. Our web-foot visitors from the far north, at all events, are
still with us, and in large numbers, and a very pretty sight a flock of
them is as you quietly approach them congregated in some sheltered hay,
and with a good binocular watch their graceful motions, now disporting
themselves and chasing each other in many a merry round over the surface
of the water; now, as if by common consent and in obedience to some, to
you inaudible, word of command, they seem to leap rather than dive into
the blue depths beneath them, until not one is to be seen, then as
suddenly reappearing, again to chase each other, and disport and dive,
as if they knew you were looking at them, and admired and loved them,
and would as soon cut off your finger as think of levelling a
murder-dealing weapon at creatures so beautiful and harmless.
A bird generally rare in our inland waters is this year
quite common on all our shores. "We refer to the goosander (Mergus
merganser,
Linn.), one of the handsomest and most interesting of sea-fowl. Of the Merganser family
the goosander is the largest, and the whole order is remarkable for
their serrated mandibles, the nearest approach to anything like teeth to
be met with among birds, and admirably adapted for retaining firm hold,
when seized, of their slippery prey, which mainly consists of eels,
lampreys, &c., in dealing with which "kittle cattle" in deep water an
ordinary unarmed duck-bill would be a very inefficient weapon. Once in
the firm grip of the Merganser's serrated
bill, however, the chance of such comparatively small fish as it can
alone feed upon must be very small indeed. We saw a very fine male
specimen a few days ago, which a young man had shot, believing it to be
a "wild duck," as he termed it, and necessarily good for eating. We told
him that he had been guilty of a piece of very unnecessary and
indefensible cruelty, for that the bird in his hand was in truth a Merganser,
and no more fit to be eaten than a ten-year-old herring gull or an
octogenarian guillemot. He looked at us with a smile, in which we
thought we detected a considerable shade of incredulity, and we do
believe that the thought passed through his mind at that moment that we
only spoke so disparagingly of the bird because we wanted to get hold of
it ourselves, either by its being given to us as a present, or for the
smallest possible money payment, and then what a jolly feed we should
have at the expense of his ornithological ignorance and juvenile
simplicity! Perhaps we do him injustice; but, at all events, he carried
the bird away with him, observing that he "would try it at any rate." We met
his sister a day or two afterwards, and on inquiring if they had cooked
the "wild duck," and how they liked it, we confess that it was with an
inward chuckle of intense satisfaction that we listened as she told us
that, after having duly boiled and cooked it secundum
artcm,
until it ought to
have been good and tender, it turned out to be so rank, and fishy, and
tough, that no one could eat a morsel of it, and it had to be thrown
into the dinner refuse basket as worthless ! These birds, though
necessarily hardy, and able to outlive a vast amount of cold and storm,
are exceedingly fond of still water, rarely resting or fishing when
there is any surface disturbance beyond a slight ripple; and hence it is
that you so seldom meet with them elsewhere than
in the most sheltered bays, creeks, and estuaries, where the water is
least liable to the surface turmoil and commotion of a storm. The finest
stuffed specimen of the Merganser we
ever saw is at Achnacarry Castle, Lochiel's seat in Lochaber.
We have said above that the winter has thus far been
almost unprecedentedly open and mild, by which we mean only that the
temperature throughout has been unusually high, not, by any means, that
it has been calm. The
very contrary is the case. It has been one continued storm, with an
occasional breathing time, so to speak, of a fine day at rare intervals,
for upwards of eight consecutive weeks. But the storms have, as
to temperature,
been rather the storms of early summer or autumn, than the boisterously
cold and burly shriekings of the lone winter "Storm King," as we used to
know and fear him. The reader -will best understand what we mean, when
we say that, notwithstanding the storminess, anemometrically, of
the season, not a single snowflake has fallen in the lowlands of Nether
Lochaber this winter, except a little which fell last night, but of
which there are no traces again this morning; nor, except twice, and
then only for an hour or so, has the thermometer touched the
freezing-point. We much doubt if the thickness of a sixpenny piece of
ice could be gathered at any one moment from pool or puddle in our
district of Lochaber during the present winter. The consequence is, that
in all our gardens flowers are at this moment in bloom that perhaps were
never known to be in bloom at the same date before. Our privet and elder
hedges bear quite a close green vesture of young leaves; the columbine
has already reached an April altitude of growth, and a woman who
happened to walk from Fort-William early last week brought us a small
bouquet of primroses that she had picked up while passing through the
woods of Coirrechaorachan, as beautiful and perfect as if it were in
truth the proper season of these favourite flowers, instead of the last
days of the first month of the year. We shouldn't wonder, however, if we
have to pay for it all yet, ere the truant schoolboy again begins to
imitate the cuckoo's note, or "the voice of the turtle is heard in our
land."
There is at this moment sitting in our kitchen a poor,
halfwitted natural, "Lachlan
Gorach,"
from Mull, whose conversation is always garnished with "Davie Gelletly"-like
snatches of quaint song. Sometimes the rhyme is in English, and
sometimes in Gaelic, and frequently has no connection whatever with what
may be the immediate subject of conversation. On going up to have a
crack with him a few moments ago—for poor Lachlan is, in a way, a great
favourite of ours—he returned our friendly greeting of "Well, how are
you, Lachlan?" with a hearty shake of the hand, and a how that, for
close proximity of forehead to the ground and duration, might have
graced the court of Louis the Fourteenth, and immediately on regaining
the erect position, struck, to an air that was probably original, into
the following verse, which we took down on the spot :—
''First the heel and then the toe,
That's the way the polka goes;
First the toe and then the heel,
That's the way to dance a reel;
Quick about and then away,
Lightly dance the glad Strathspey.
Jump a jump, and jump it big,
That's the way to dance a jig;
Slowly, smiling as in France,
Follow through the country dance.
And we'll meet Johnny Cope in the morning."
It was very amusing. Where he picked up the uncouth rhyme
we do not know, and it was bootless to inquire. Having ordered him some
dinner, we bade him good-bye, when we caught hold of the following verse
of Lachlan's favourite ditties as we disappeared :—
"Kilt your coaties, bonnie lassie,
As you wade the burnie through;
Or your mother will be angry
If you wet your coaties now."
Poor Lachlan, always cheerful and perfectly harmless, is
a welcome guest at every fireside throughout the many districts which he
periodically peregrinates. We may have something more to say of himself
and his quaint scraps of songs on a future occasion. |