32 Lord Lilford's Cruise in the Mediterranean. 



We saw no species of Gull but the two above mentioned, 

 no Rock-Doves, no Swifts, and very few Shags. We were so 

 eager about the Gulls that we neglected the Falcons ; and I 

 only bagged one, a very fine old bird in the sooty plumage. 

 A pair of quite unmistakable Falco harharus had their nest 

 in a cleft of rock near the summit of the island, and flew 

 round, screaming loudly. The contrast between the flight, 

 cry, and habits of the Barbary and Eleanora Falcons was very 

 interesting. The former is a true Peregrine, a very typical 

 representative of the genus Falco, darting high round the 

 rocks like an arrow with an angry chide, and occasionally 

 making a fierce stoop at one of the other species, as if annoyed 

 by their abundance and apparently purposeless wavering 

 flight. We remained about this part of Sardinia till the 

 morning of May 30th, and paid other visits to Vacca and 

 Toro, obtaining two more specimens of Audouin^s Gull, with 

 five more eggs, all hard sat and very difficult to blow. 



We secured altogether fifteen specimens of Falco eleanoree 

 (the greater number of which were males) in all their 

 various stages of plumage. I consider these Falcons emi- 

 nently crepuscular. They have all the wing-power of their 

 near relation the Common Hobby, though in spite of the 

 wonderful ease and rapidity of their evolutions there is, to 

 the eye of a falconer, something soft and unfalconlike in 

 their habits and general appearance, their very full, dark, 

 liquid eye (so different from the piercing optics of F. pere- 

 grinus), their weak legs and claws, and their extravagantly 

 long wings and tails. With one exception, the crops of all 

 of them contained notliing but insects ; and it is worthy of 

 note that whilst the crops of the dark-plumaged birds were 

 crammed with very small black beetles, which swarm upon 

 Vacca, the lighter-plumaged birds appeared to feed more 

 upon dipterous insects, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and, in 

 several instances, small crustaceans. I am no entomologist, 

 and may be mistaken in my definition of these little animals ; 

 but, speaking ignorantly, I should say the Falcons feed, or at 

 all events were feeding when we shot them, almost exclusively 

 upon beetles, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and shrimps. In one 



