The bird is, however, unquestionably a rara avis, a rarissima avis even, in the north of Scotland, and to have seen the bird as Mr. Snowie was privileged to see and handle it, we should cheerfully have walked ten miles, were it the coldest day in mid-winter.
Whelks and Periwinkles--An Ossianic Reading--The Sea-shore after a Storm--The Rejectamenta of the Deep--An amusing Story of a Shore-Searcher--Severity of Winter--Wild-Birds' Levee--Woodcock--Snipe--Blue Jay.
It has been our habit for many years [January 1875] to take our morning walk along our beautiful sea-beach, one of the coziest and prettiest silver-sanded bays on the West Coast, descending now and again, when the tide is at ebb, to search for objects of interest in marine animal and vegetable life, in every likely spot along what Ossian calls "tràigh na faoch,"--the periwinkled shore. Our friend and neighbour Dr. Clerk, by the way, in his admirable edition of the great Celtic bard, renders it "the shore of whelks," and in a note gives us to understand that he thinks the expression so unpoetical, infra dig., and every way inappropriate, as almost to warrant its rejection as a corruption of the text. As a conjectural emendation, he suggests "tràigh na faobh," the shore of spoils, as probably the true reading. Faoch, however, is not the whelk, but the periwinkle or wilk. The whelk is the Buccinum undatum, the cnogag or cnocag of the Gaels of the Western seaboard and Hebrides. The wilk or periwinkle is the faoch or faochag; and to it and not to the whelk the passage clearly refers. The whelk or cnogag rarely allows itself to be left behind on the beach by the receding waters, even in spring tides, when ebbs are at their lowest. The periwinkle, on the contrary, sticks, regardless of the receding waves, to its place or stone or algae stem and frond, until the ebbing waters have returned, as return he knows full well they shall; so that at any time after half ebb, a suitable shore, rich in algæ, presents a most interesting sight, every stone and smallest bit of sea-weed covered with millions of periwinkles at all stages of growth. It is to a scene of this kind that the poet refers, and very happily we think: "the periwinkled shore" is a thousand times better than the "barren, barren shore" of Tennyson. No one objects to "daisied mead" or "daisied lea," and "periwinkled shore," as we have seen it, and as hundreds, we make no doubt, of our readers have also seen it, is, to our thinking, every whit as poetical, and in no sense inconsistent even with epic dignity. Wilks having within recent years become an article of considerable marketable value, being carefully gathered on every beach, the "periwinkled shore" of Ossian is, of course, a rarer sight now-a-days than it used to be. Nearly as plentiful on our shores as the common periwinkle itself is its first cousin, the Purpura lapillus of conchologists, or yellow periwinkle, one of those creatures that furnished the famous purple dye of the ancients. It has a bitter, astringent taste, and is in consequence not eaten like its congener, the wilk. We have said that our favourite morning walk is invariably, if we can accomplish it, along the sea-beach; and hardly a day passes but we can show something interesting and new, picked up in these our littoral perambulations. After a storm particularly, we endeavour, whatever our other engagements, to devote an hour at least to a ramble along the shore, and it is rarely we return empty-handed: some curious waif or other, cast up by the storm, seldom fails to be forthcoming as the reward of our matutinal diligence. After a severe gale one morning last week, we found a dead kittiwake, but perfectly plump and fresh, lying on the top of a mass of drift tangle. The bird itself was no great rarity, for the kittiwake (Larus rissa, Linn.), a very pretty little gull, is common on all our shores, even in winter. The curious thing was that, on taking up the bird in our hand, we found that one of its feet was firmly held in the vice-like grasp of a large mussel, the mussel in its turn being anchored by its byssus to a tangle root (Laminaria digitata) of immense size. The poor kittiwake had evidently been fairly trapped: the case was clear. Walking along the beach at low-water, in search of food, it must have stepped inadvertently and unwittingly into the jaws, so to speak, of the open, or rather half-open, mussel, which, in resentment of the intrusion, instantly closing with a steel trap-like snap, held the poor bird firm and fast. There was no chance or hope of escape, and the unfortunate little gull, thus anchored to the bottom, was miserably drowned by the advancing tide.