192 
that it will take many a flood yet to amalgamate, and up this 
I crept until I was only about sixty feet below the nest. Here, 
however, I could see nothing of the bird, I shouted and kicked 
the cliff, the men below screamed, threw fragments of kunker 
(one of which very nearly blinded me) and by various signs 
attempted to indicate to Mrs. Bonelli that a change of locality 
was desirable. Serenely sublime in the discharge of her mater- 
nal duties, that lady took no notice whatsoever of the uproar 
below ; accustomed to the passage of noisy boat crews, and, like 
some other sovereigns who sit calmly aloft, unable to realize 
that it is really against their sacred selves that the mob beneath 
is howling, the Hagle never moved. Beaten at our first move, 
we changed our plan. I crept down the talus, and sent up a 
man to throw down dust and small pieces of earth, (we were 
afraid of breaking the eggs), in the hopes of driving her off the 
nest. Luckily the very first piece of earth hit her, then came a 
shower of sand, and concluding I suppose that the cliff was (as 
it often does) about to fall, she flew off the nest with a rapid 
swoop. Bang, bang, both barrels, 12 bore, No. 3 green 
cartridge, full im the chest, (as the body showed when we 
skinned it), and yet with a half fall, like a tumbler Pigeon, 
through some fifteen or twenty feet she recovered herself and 
swooped away as if unhurt, close along the face of the cliff; a 
hundred yards further I saw a tremor, then in a moment it 
was clear that she was in the death struggle, she began to sink, 
and an instant after fell over and over on to a flat block of clay 
with almost incredible violence. The dust flew up from where 
she fell, as if a shell had dropt there, but as a specimen, the bird 
was scarcely injured. 
“We had hardly secured the female, after the manner of bird- 
stuffers, plugging nostrils and* shot holes, stuffing throat and 
smoothing feathers, when we heard a shrill creaking cry and 
saw the male coming straight for the nest with a bird, (which 
turned out tobe a Zurtur Cambayensis) in his talons. Coming to 
the nest, the bird seemed surprised to find it empty, it took no 
notice whatsoever of us, nor did it apparently catch sight of its 
mate, stretched out with her white breast uppermost on the 
deck-like platform of our barge, but it straightway settled itself 
down in the centre of the nest and became entirely invisible. 
Again tiny stones were thrown down and after standing up, 
staring proudly round and stalking to the edge of the platform, 
where he was hailed with shouts, the male.bird flew off slowly, 
swooping down to within twenty yards of where I sat, and the 
next moment dropped stone dead with only a loose charge of 
No. 6 through him. 
