A PACK DISPOSED OF. 101 



by two eaglets, evidently to teach their young to stoop and 

 lift their prey.* The old birds tore up turfs from the mountain 

 side, rose high in the air, and dropped them. The eaglets, in 

 turn, stooped, and took them up again. This was frequently 

 repeated, and the course of instruction having lasted half-an- 

 hour, the eagles mounted to their aerie, and, leaving their 

 progeny safely in the nest, sailed off upon the rising breeze 

 to provide for the evening meal. We viewed the proceedings of 

 this predatory family through the telescope of the coast-guard, 

 who gave us many curious anecdotes of those daring and 

 destructive birds. 



We took an opposite course to the barren beat we had 

 yesterday pursued. The bogs were intersected by several 

 mountain-streams, whose dry and heathy banks offered excel- 

 lent feeding and shelter for grouse. Our success, however, 

 was very indifferent to what we had anticipated, from the 

 promising appearance of the ground, and we had spent an hour, 

 hunting with two brace of prime dogs, before we saw a bird. 

 We met numerous indications of a strong pack having recently 

 visited the river, and left no place untried which birds might 

 be expected to frequent. At last, we began to imagine that 

 the eagles had been here before us, when at some distance a 

 young setter dropped on a heathy brow that overhung the 

 rivulet. We were advancing, but the. pack, alarmed by the 

 sudden appearance of the dog above them, took wing, and we 

 had to content ourselves with reckoning them, as they got up 

 bird by bird. We counted nineteen, and concluded that two 

 broods had packed accidentally.! They all pitched in a scat- 

 tered manner on the side of a neighbouring eminence, and 

 having marked them carefully down, we took up one brace of 

 dogs, and with the other proceeded quietly to work. I never 

 in my sporting experience saw a pack disposed of in better 

 style. The dogs picked up the broken birds immediately, and 

 with one miss (mine was the deed !) we brought nine brace 



* " The story of the eagle brought to the ground, after a severe conflict 

 with a cat, which it had seized and taken up into the air with its talons, 

 is very remarkable. Mr. Barber, who was an eye-witness of the fact, 

 made a drawing of it, which he afterwards engraved." Bewick. 



f I have never known red grouse flock in Ireland. Excepting an 

 accidental junction of two broods, I have not met with grouse in any 

 considerable number. Broods will occasionally pack together, but it is 

 not a commom occurrence. 



