ii To the Engstlen Alp once more 23 



others of its kind, it has found out in Bern and a 

 few other cities that man's architecture suits it 

 even better. What can be happier for such an 

 aerial bird than to be able to sweep round and 

 round a lofty tower unimpeded by walls of rock ? 

 So it has come down from its mountains to the 

 plain, and taken possession of the noble tower at 

 Bern. There it builds a curious flat nest, formed 

 of dried leaves, bits of paper, and of fir-bark, with 

 a few feathers, on beams and ledges within the 

 tower. Like the Chinese bird whose nest is eaten 

 in the East, it secretes a saliva with which to glue 

 these materials together; for in wind-swept caves 

 and towers they could hardly be held together 

 without some such device. The glutinous mass is 

 very apparent in the nests exhibited in the Museum 

 at Bern, which are hardly pleasing in appearance, 

 being not unlike a series of ancient and gruesome 

 cheesecakes well flattened. The eggs are pure white, 

 and of an elongated oval shape. 1 



When I was last at Bern we did not stay there 

 long, but went on in the afternoon to the Hotel 



1 Mr. Scott Wilson, who himself ascended the tower in 1885, 

 has well described the nesting -places of this colony in the Ibis 

 of April 1887. I extract a sentence or two: "The nests, of 

 which we could see about twenty, were placed on the ledge which 

 goes round the tower (i.e. inside), and about four feet below the 

 main floor on which we were standing. . . . Sometimes there were 

 three or four in the space of three yards, all placed on the same 

 beam, and on most of the nests we could see an old bird sitting." 



