12 BIRD LIFE IN WILD WALES 



trapper takes advantage and seldom fails to bring 

 poor Biiteo to bag. 



But we digress. Leaving this ancestral haunt of 

 the Buzzard, we strike across the moorland, hoping, 

 but in vain, for a glimpse of the Short-eared Owl, 

 which, from what we can learn, breeds here sparingly. 



Passing from the heathery waste, we once more 

 reach a mountain torrent, which here runs between 

 two magnificent lines of cliff, towering in places to,^- 

 perhaps eight hundred feet or more above the rough 

 path which skirts the stream. In some places these 

 rocks rise sheer or nearly so, whilst in others they 

 are broken up into crags and fairly accessible turf- 

 covered slopes. 



Here on this beetling crag, then, three-parts of the 

 way up the cliff, let us rest awhile and enjoy the 

 beauties of a May afternoon. A colony of Jackdaws 

 are tenants here for the season ; they, noisy, chat- 

 tering fellows, fly backwards and forwards past the 

 face of the cliff, showing their displeasure in their 

 cries. One, bolder than the rest, attempts to visit its 

 nest, built a few feet above us, in a cleft of the rock, 

 but seeing us so close, dashes off again. 



Here, too, the pretty little " Red Hawk," as the 

 Welsh call him — the Kestrel we mean — has his abode. 

 Two or three pairs are in the air together at this 

 moment, and what an embodiment of grace they look 

 as, circling round one another on motionless pinions 

 or stooping at some impudent Daw, they at length 

 sweep into the rugged hillside with their wild " klee, 

 klee, klee, keelie," where in a week or so, on no more 

 than a ledge of the rock, the handsome red eggs will 



