390 The Griffon Vulture 
the largest and most inaccessible precipices, which, as we are all 
told from our childhood, are the home of Eagle and Vulture. 
Nor was I disappointed in so far as seeing the birds went, but 
they were nesting in situations which were either absolutely im- 
possible to reach without ropes and plenty of them, or by cliff 
climbing of the most perilous and adventurous type. As I had 
neither ropes at hand nor any experience of rock-work at the time, 
I had in the first instance to accept defeat. Three years elapsed 
before I was able to make an expedition to the same spot: during 
that interval I had profited by my former experiences and had 
become a fairly competent cliff climber. I had, above all, by 
going aloft at sea obtained the necessary confidence in dealing 
with heights. Previous to this I was looked upon as an expert 
tree climber; in fact, there were few trees which | could not climb 
and none which had defeated me where reaching a coveted nest 
was concerned. But there is a vast difference between working 
up the top of a tall tree, possibly 100 ft. high, with a good hand- 
hold, and working among crags where the heights are reckoned in 
hundreds in lieu of in tens of feet and the chances of a sound hand- 
hold are most uncertain in places. The cliff where I obtained my 
first Griffon Vulture’s egg has since become well-known owing to 
an account of my expedition thither, which I wrote to the late 
Henry Seebohm, having been published in his work on “ British 
Birds’ Nests and Eggs,” for the Griffon is by courtesy a British 
Bird owing to a wanderer having been once taken in Ireland. 
An old friend of mine, however, a famous ornithologist, now dead, 
who had seen thousands of Griffons in his life, was certain he saw 
one in the New Forest about twenty-five years ago, 
This cliff is a very imposing mass of sandstone which rises over 
six hundred feet from the stream at its base; a portion of it is 
much fissured and broken and contains numerous caverns wherein 
these big birds delight to nest. This part is easily scaled by any 
