SPORT IN THE HIGHLANDS.* Ma. CHARLES Sr. JOHN was an
enthusiastic sportsman and naturalist. Living in one of the wildest parts of the Highlands, he had abundant opportunities of studying the habits of many birds and animals, some of which are now almost peculiar to that district, and being gifted with keen powers of observa- tion he very soon filled a journal with interesting and valuable notes. He was a thoroughly conscientious man. He describes nothing that he had not himself seen, and as he seems to have been nearly always out shooting or fishing when the weather was fine he saw a great deal. The fruits of this ardour enabled him to do for Moray what White did for Selborne. In every respect this work deserves to take a place by White's. It is seldom that
• Natural History and Sport in Morey. Collected from the Journals and Letters of the late Charles St. John. Edinburgh: Edmonton and Douglas. 1S33. so large a fund of information is brought together, and as Mr. St. John possessed considerable literary talent he tells his story so well, that even the reader who is not a sportsman will wish that there was more of it. There is a short memoir of the author prefixed to the journal, but it tells us little more of Mr. St. John than that he was the son of General the Hon. Frederick St. John, and that he was born in 1809. Some portion of his life he spent in London, and to this, perhaps, was partly owing his intense love and enjoyment of nature when he found himself in a Highland home. Notwithstanding the vulgar belief about those who are obliged to live in large towns, there is no class who have a greater love of the country or use their eyes to better purpose when they are in it. St. John's end was a melancholy one. He had been troubled with headaches for some time, but they naturally occasioned little anxiety. At the latter end of 1853 he was out with his gun when paralysis seized his left side, and he was taken home a helpless invalid. Change of air was tried, and the sufferer was ever indulging the hope that he should. see again the wild coast he loved so well, and resume his favourite occupation. But it was not so to be. He died near Southampton in July, 1856, having thus lived for two years and a half in the sad state of incapability which breaks the spirit and wears out hope.
One of the subjects which occupied St. John's thoughts was the foolish and misguided destruction of small birds, even then becoming general in Scotland. Since his death the practice has notoriously increased to such an extent that some parts of the country are overrun with grubs and caterpillars. Last year a Sussex club gloried in having killed 7,261 sparrows, and the man who killed the largest number received a prize—a fool's cap it ought to have been. A pair of sparrows, during the time they are feeding their young, are said to kill about 3,400 caterpillars a week. The service they thus render to the farmer is obviously out of all proportion to the loss they cause him by eating a few ears of grain. In an orchard, small birds, no doubt, commit a certain degree of mischief; but we believe that what St. John remarked of titmice is true of almost all other birds. They seldom, he says, " touch a bud which does not con- tain a small grub or caterpillar, and the benefit which they con- fer by the destruction of insects and caterpillars, and also of the minute eggs of these creatures, exceeds all belief." Even rooks, which undoubtedly are capable of causing great injury to crops, and will even spoil the stacks in the yard if they are not driven off, do a great deal for their food. They will almost completely clear a field of the wireworm and grub. St. John says On close observation, when the rook appears to be following the harrows for the purpose of feeding on the newly sown wheat, it will be found that it is picking up a great quantity of large white grubs, leaving the grain untouched." Farmers, however, persist in poisoning them, instead of being content with scaring them off the field which is suffering from their attacks. It is easy enough to keep rooks away, and anyone may have observed that when a rook is shot among his companions in a particular field they will none of them return to that spot again. It is not, however, always easy to shoot a rook, for if a man approaches with a gun the field where they are settled the sentinel immediately gives the signal and they fly off. The same man might walk nearly up to them with a stick and they would scarcely move. They seem to have a wonderfully keen scent for gunpowder. St. John, who probably never tried a shot at them, does not appear to have observed this fact. Strychnine is the fatal poison for crows and rooks, and we find in this volume a hint that our farmers do not need, but which we quote as illustra- tive of the system of poisoning actually adopted :—" Ryon put a piece of carrion in a tree well seasoned with this powerful drug, the ground below it will soon be strewed with the bodies of most of the crows in the neighbourhood, so instantaneous is their death on swallowing any of it. It seems almost immediately to para- lyze them, and they fall down on the spot."
Deer-stalking was, of course, a favourite sport with St. John, and he tells two or three stories that will cause every true sports- man's blood to tingle. There is a pathetic account of a deer which had had one of its forelegs shot nearly away, and was being pursued by the author's man, who had contrived to send a couple of bullets into the poor dying animal. Still it hobbled on, and happened to pass the place where St. John was lying smoking his pipe. Not observing him, it " stopped and stool in a pitiful attitude, trembling all over, and moving its head up and down as if oppressed with deadly sickness." Then its pursuers came in sight, and the now feeble stag tried to start again, but could do no more than hobble painfully. So it crouched down in Vie water, "as if trusting to the surrounding rocks for concealment ;" but the dogs soon finished its sufferings. A shot through the heart does not always kill the deer, unless it strikes the upper part of it. The man who attended Mr. St. John in his wanderings believed that a deer never lies down when shot through the liver, but keeps moving, " or at any rate standing, till he dies." During these deer-stalking expeditions the author was sometimes disappointed of his larger prize, and obliged to be satisfied with a few brace of grouse. This bird, thanks to the annual massacres just after the 12th, is certainly being thinned in numbers every year. The curious disease which destroys so many of them, and which in some districts threatens to exterminate them, has been less prevalent than usual this year; but in Mr. St. John's time it was so bad that they were found by dozens lying dead on the heather. He observes that "tire plumage of the bird was much altered, having a red rusty appearance, instead of the fine rich colour characteristic of the grouse." Persons who buy these birds in the London market will do well to remember the symptoms and effects of this disease. The state of the le g feathers will show it at once, as a foot-note to this journal observes :—" In diseased birds the fir stockings are wanting, or miserably smirched and worn." Mr. St. John suggests that every grouse should be shot down in the infected part of the hills ; but this would not be doing away with the source of the disease, which would, no doubt, still re-appear. He also thinks that shooting should not begin till the 21th of August, and adds a remark which many a man who rushes off with his gun the moment the law allows him would do well to consider : — " The early period [the 12th] is only fit for those who sheet for the newspaper, as certain sportsmen seem to do whose names appear every season as having murdered some marvellous num- ber of grouse on the 12th. One grouse in October is a more satis- factory prize to the real lover of grouse-shooting than twelve can be on the first day of the season. By October the grouse, instead of being, as in August, a half-plumaged and often half-grown bird, is one of the finest and most game-looking birds in the world."
Eagles were not often molested by this true sportsman, but several interesting facts are related concerning them. It has often been stated that the royal bird will gorge on the carcase of a sheep, when it has the chance, till it is unable to rise, and may be knocked on the head with a countryman's stick,—" a sad and ignoble fate," as the author says, "for the king of birds." He states that several instances of eagles being killed in this manner came under his notice. They are ruthlessly destroyed in the Highlands by means of traps, and, in consequence, the mountain hares overrun the country. Among the odd notes in this journal is one winch throws out an idea that strikes us as being entirely new. It is that the aurora borealis—" the merry dancers" they call it in the Highlands—emits a sound " like the moving of dead leaves," as the author's keeper describes it. Mr. St. John con- firms the keeper, and adds, "It has occasionally happened to me to be gazing at this beautiful illumination in places where no other sound could be heard, and then, and then only, have I fancied that the brightest flashes were accompanied haL a light crackling or rustling noise, or, as my keeper had expressed it very correctly, the moving of dead leaves.' " .Like the child with the orange wine, Mr. St. John and his keeper must have fancied "very much," we think ; but the statement is worth the attention of the scientific. Another fact that few will know is that the skylark may be beard singing as late as twelve at night; but this is in Shetland. A very interesting passage in the journal refers to the wonderful instinct which guides birds in their search for food. Pigeons drop down upon peas almost directly they are put into the ground, and "the small gulls, particularly the black- headed gull, discover the ploughman before Ile has finished his first furrow, and collect in great flocks to pick up every grub or worm which he turns up." Of curious notes like this, —the notes of an honest, painstaking, unwearied lover of nature,—this volume is full, and a very pleasant companion it will consequently always prove to every man who shares St. John's tastes, even though he may not possess those opportunities of gratifying them which St. John enjoyed so much.
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