188 FIELD-STUDIES OF RARER BIRDS 



a sea-precipice hard to beat for its awful, forbidding 

 height and stern grandeur. It is no exaggeration 

 to say that in places this cliff falls sheer and 

 overhanging for close on a thousand feet to the 

 boiling surge below, while the least fearful parts 

 are a combination of break-neck gradients and 

 minor walls of basalt. There are two ancient 

 eyries here; in such a stupendous steep there may 

 well be more : probably there are. Of the two 

 nests, however, one is utterly impregnable; it could 

 not be stormed with all the tackle in Christendom, 

 being as it is some four hundred feet down a 

 fearsomely overlapping section of cliff, about nine 

 hundred feet high. Usually when the Golden 

 Eagle nests in a cliff (for some place their eyries 

 in trees) it selects as a site for its eyrie a large 

 and more or less turf-covered ledge or recess, but 

 this nest is on a small (i.e. for the size of the 

 structure), bare, and but slightly protected ledge, 

 and, viewed from a horn of the bay, it appears to 

 have been abandoned for years, though, for 

 all that, the surviving Eagle makes some 

 sort of pretence at patching up both old 

 homes annually. The other nest, however, 

 about a quarter-mile from it, to which I have 

 been lowered, is in a huge, cavernous recess some 

 four hundred feet down another terrific head- 

 land; but the first two hundred and fifty feet can 

 be negotiated without tackle. Outside the cavern 

 is a large, sloping, grass-grown ledge, though 



