The Birds of Pembrokeshire. 37 
birds year after year, and had probably been occupied by genera- 
tion after generation of Ravens. While we were watching it, the 
Ravens, in their anger and excitement, kept on performing ex- 
traordinary evolutions in the air, at one instant shooting vertically 
upwards, the next instant, swooping down and disappearing 
behind a neighbouring cliff, they would again dart upwards, and 
sometimes suddenly swoop so close to our heads that we could 
feel the vibration of the air as they darted by. All the time they 
barked and croaked their wrath at our intrusion. It would 
have been perfectly easy to have shot them both, and we have 
heard with regret that a nest of Ravens, that had been long 
established on the coast, a little to the east of Tenby, was des- 
troyed through the keepers shooting the old birds when they 
offered themselves as easy victims at the breeding season. 
Ravens nest very early in the year; Mr. Tracy saw eggs in a nest 
on 14th February in 1842, and took six from another nest 
on 4th April in that year. In Dr. Propert’s splendid collection 
of eggs, there is a very fine and remarkable clutch of Ravens’ 
eggs that were taken by Mr. Mortimer Propert, on Ramsey 
Island, in the spring of 1885 : the eggs are large in size, and are 
pyriform in shape, like the eggs of the Guillemot. We have 
in our cabinet an exactly similar clutch of six eggs, taken a year 
or two since at romantic Tintagel, in Cornwall. The Rev. C. 
M. Phelps writes : “ Just beyond Pendine (in the neighbourhood 
of Tenby) rises Gilman Point, a lofty headland of limestone. 
Gilman introduces us to an important personage, Corvus corax 
—the Raven. How persecuted this bird is! I verily believe 
he has been driven from other parts of South Wales to find 
4 more secure home on the wild coast of Pembrokeshire. 
Here he nests in the most inaccessible cliffs. It is no easy matter 
to take a Raven’s nest. The cliff is often 200 feet high and 
more. A nest taken last week was placed in such a cliff, and 
some go feet from the top. The summit of this cliff considerably 
overhung its base, so that the man dangled in mid-air during his 
descent. In another case, at St. David’s, the nest was located 
in the roof of a cavern, and the collector, suspended over the 
