Boobrie

The Boobrie is a creature of the western Scottish Highlands and Islands, recorded primarily from Argyll, where it haunts the freshwater lochs and coastal inlets. It is a shapeshifter: most often described as an enormous black bird, taller than any crane, with a hooked bill and webbed feet, but capable of taking the form of a water horse to lure travellers. Its cry, witnesses agreed, was not birdlike at all — it bellowed like a bull.

Its preferred prey was livestock: cattle and horses driven to water's edge to drink would be seized and dragged under. Drovers crossing the Highlands were said to give the lochs a wide berth when the cattle were thirsty, rather than risk losing a beast to the Boobrie. J. F. Campbell collected accounts of it in his nineteenth-century fieldwork through Argyll, and folklorist John Gregorson Campbell placed it firmly in the Highland water-spirit tradition alongside the Each-Uisge and the Afanc.