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FROM SPAIN. 461 
young one that we took out of the nest. One of my acquaint- 
ances, too, who for more than twenty years has been hunting 
after birds of prey in Spain, has only killed one Bearded 
Vulture during the whole of that period, and for that success 
he was indebted to a chance encounter during the winter. 
All the hunters of the Sierra Nevada told me that the 
Bearded Vulture still exists among the Sierras, but that it has 
become rarer, and that I fully believe. An equally persistent 
pursuit of it has quite put an end to the breeding of this 
noble bird in our Austrian Alps ; and in Switzerland also its 
existence has almost become a matter of history. This will, 
sooner or later, be the case in Spain, for the herdsmen dislike 
it as a neighbour and try to destroy its nest, or at any rate to 
scare away the old birds, and only a few days before my arrival 
they demolished one of its abodes by throwing stones at it. 
The common occurrence of the Bearded Vulture in Spain, 
to which even some books testify, is, therefore, quite out of the 
question ; and when Howard Saunders, in his ‘ Catalogue des 
Oiseaux du midi de l’Hspagne, which he laid before the 
Société Zoologique de France, in speaking of the Gypaétus 
barbatus, says: “ Un ou deux couples se trouvent sédentaires 
dans toutes les montagnes, mais c’est dans la Sierra Nevada 
que ce beau rapace devient presque abondant,” he is altogether 
wrong, and if his statement was founded on any observations 
at all they must have been very faulty. 
