Notes on the natural history of the Bell RockCampbell, J. M. (John MacLean)
History
Notes on the natural history of the Bell Rock
Campbell, J. M. (John MacLean)
Lighthouses -- Natural history; Natural history -- Scotland -- Bell Rock
A round of the different fishing pools was made this month at low
water, resulting in the capture of a most unhealthy-looking specimen
of a poddley in the “Hospital” (Neill’s Pool). Long, lank, and lean,
a post-mortem revealed the liver attenuated to a mere thread. It is
most remarkable why these sickly fish should favour this pool alone.
About twenty feet in diameter and twelve feet deep, with the bottom
thickly strewn with rounded boulders, there is always a shallow wash
into it at the lowest state of the tide. Possibly its greater depth
offers a safer refuge for these convalescents than the other pools.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that in this pool alone these
specimens are found; not only poddlies, but lythe and cod as well.
With the flying fish of the tropics we are more or less familiar, and
of tree-climbing fish and overland travellers we have the testimony
of travellers that such perverse specimens do exist. The _ceratodus_
of Queensland, for instance, which, with its peculiar respiratory
arrangement and ambulatory fins is enabled to transport itself over
swampy ground in migrating from pool to pool, a feat suggestive of
the Yankee’s shallow-draught steamer, to which an ordinary meadow was
easily navigable, providing there had been a heavy dewfall. The cause
of these reflections was the discovery of a small fish, some four
inches in length, on the cleaning path encircling our lantern, over
a hundred feet from its usual habitat. Of the “cobbler” variety, the
expanded pectoral fins might, with a little imagination, be imbued with
the powers of flight, but more than likely our visitor owed its exalted
position to some predatory gull, which, unable to bolt its victim or
escape from covetous neighbours, had dropped it where found.
A solitary lapwing was our only feathered visitor for the mouth.
Apropos of these days of “retaliation,” there is an old Scottish Act
of Parliament of the time of Edward the First relating to this bird,
in which all its eggs are ordered to be broken when found, “in order
that Peesweeps may not go south, and become a delicious repast to our
unnatural enemies the English!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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