Download Volume 12 here

46 Gaelic Society of fnueniess.
HOODED CROW.
hatin—Corvus comix. GSieMc-- Feannaij-ffhlas, Garrar/-g/das, Garrachi/oioitj,
Starracj-young, in Harris. Welsh Bran yr Jwerddon.
Bad as the character of the carrion crow is, I am afraid that
t\vi hoodie is worse, as will be seen from the following quotation
from Cxrey— '-The hoodie has got a terrible name, and his best
friend could hardly say one good word in his favour, supposing
he ever had such a thing as a friend, which is improbable. A
greedy, cowardly, destructive creature, his appearance is ugly,
and his voice hateful. But though no doiibt ready enough to
commit any villainy against eggs, young game, chickens, ajui even
young lambs, yet in these wild districts where there is not much
game to injure, he subsists almo.st entirely on the bountiful provision
afforded by the receding tide, and upon this multiplies exceedingly."
A well-known habit of the hoodie is that, when it
gets a crab or shell-fish with too strong a shell to break with its
bill, it carries it high up in the air and lets it f;ill on the rock to
break it, and, if it does not succeed in the first attempt, it goes
much higher the second time. There is a very old Gaelic proverb
common in AthoU—Clia tig olc a teine, ach ubli na glas fheannaig.
—Nothing evil will come out of the fire but the grey crow's egg.
Sherift' Nicolson explains— "There is a strange story in Rannoch
al>out the great wizard, Michael Scott, to account for this saying.
It is said that, fearing his wife, to whom he had taught the
Black Art, would excel him in it, he killed her by means of
hoodie crows' eggs, heated in the fire and put into her arm-))its,
as the only thing against which no counter charm could i)revail!"
So commom and ?o destructive weie the hoodies at one time in
the North that they gave rise to the old Morayshire proverb
"The Guil, the Gordon, and the Hooded Craw
Were the three worst things Moray ever saw."
The gide is well-known weed, even yet too common amongst gi'owing
crops, but at one time so very abundant that most tenants
were bound by their leases to eradicate it. The Gordon was the
famous Lord Lewis Gordon, who so often plundered Moray, and
whose (xami)le seems to have been followed with a vengeance by
the hoodie crow.
liOOK.
Latin - To/ (v/.s- friniHeiinx. Gaelic — Ronm, Cmimliach, darraq
(Atiiolc). \\Q\A\-~-Ydfran.
Clio (raidhealach ris na garragan — as Highlanil as tin- rooks^
is a very (.•umiiiou saying in Atliolc, where*, from the wooded
—
—