The Oologisis' Record, September i, 1921. 59 



with four eggs. I shot and identified the bird with certainty, but 

 it was too battered for preservation, so I was unable to keep it to 

 determine whether it belonged to the typical race, Sylvia cantillans 

 cantillans, or the North-west African race, Sylvia cantillans 

 inornata, as the darker red of the under-parts rather suggested. 

 It is indeed remarkable to what an extent the local birds seemed 

 to be akin to the North African forms rather than to the European.* 

 This nest was in a gorse bush among oak and other trees. We 

 found a second nest in gorse but without eggs, also a nest of the 

 Spanish Blackbird with four eggs, and a nest of the Sardinian 

 Warbler, Sylvia melanocephala melanocephala, with five most 

 beautiful erythristic eggs ; it was placed in a tiny prickly bush. 

 We also got a nest of four Cirl Bunting's eggs in a thorn bush and 

 a nest of four Blue Rock Thrush in the hole of a wall of a ruined 

 house in the centre of Grazalema. A number of Woodchat Shrikes, 

 Lanius senator, were seen this day. 



On 25th April I left Grazalema on horseback at 5 a.m. for 

 Montejaque en route for Seville, leaving McNeile behind. The day 

 had not broken when I started, and the Scops Owls, Otiis scops, 

 were calling from the cliff below the"town, while almost at the same 

 time a Cuckoo commenced to call also. Not manj' birds of interest 

 were seen until near by Montejaque, when- I observed a party of 

 Bee-eaters, Merops apiaster, about the road. Entering my train at 

 9.10 a.m. I had the good fortune to make Seville, 50 or 60 

 miles distant as the crow flies, by 5.45 the same evening ! I stayed 

 there the night and went on to Coria the next morning. That 

 day I explored the river banks belov\' Coria but found httle of 



* Paul Gwynne, in his recent work on " The Guadalquivir," writes : — 

 " When observant people who have been in Morocco or Algeria visit 

 the basin of the Guadalquivir, they are struck by the resemblance of the 

 Andalucian landscape to that of Northern Africa. Here are the same types 

 of hill and gorge, the same patches of rocky desert at higher levels, the same 

 watercourses which run dry in summer, the same cactus, aloe and locust . 

 tree. In the Boletin of the Geographical Society of Madrid, Don Federico 

 Botella even goes so far as to point out that the fauna as well as the flora 

 of this district are African and not truly Iberian, though it seems to me that 

 fauna have legs which the frowning Sierra Morena could hardly confine to 

 the south. For Botella's argument is that this range of mountains once 

 formed the southern cliffs of the peninsula, and that a channel of the Atlantic 

 separated Andalucia from Europe. Andalucia was then a part of Africa, 

 the Straits of Gibraltar did not exist, Hercules was not born, nor were his 

 Pillars thought of." — Editor's Note. 



