FOURTH DAY. 63 



noticed early in the morning, where an Osprey seemed to 

 have taken up its abode, but our futile attempts to drive out the 

 possible occupant of the nest showed that our hopes were 

 ill-founded. 



After a number of shooting misadventures, a keen sports- 

 man seizes the smallest prospect afforded him of retrieving 

 his failures by a success of some kind ; so I even thought of 

 the wild geese, and wanted to try to get near them, but 

 Hodek thought this would be a perfectly useless attempt. 



On getting back to the old willow, the abandoned dwelling 

 of the Eagle-Owl, we determined to take the nest, a trouble- 

 some but remunerative task ; so I made Ferencz bring my 

 craft up to the trunk of a fallen old willow that was only 

 partly submerged, for I was obliged to get out, as the men 

 required two " csikeln " as a first step towards climbing the 

 tree, and this prostrate stem was for far and wide the only 

 island. I then tried to crawl slowly up its slanting and 

 rather slippery surface, and after some trouble and the 

 frequent prospect of a cold bath I fortunately succeeded in 

 so doing, and seated myself on the gnarled branches furthest 

 from the water to watch the taking of the nest. 



Ferencz, who was a particularly clever climber, swung 

 himself from the edge of the " csikel " up the stem of the tree 

 with the assistance of the climbing-irons. The upper part of 

 the old willow was so broad that he could move quite easily 

 along its slanting surface, and on reaching the hole which 

 served as the entrance to the nest he felt cautiously inside, 

 and first carefully pulled out the newly-killed bodies of four 

 Moorhens, which the owl had probably brought this very 

 day as food for the young. The bodies were quite intact, 

 but, curiously enough, all the heads were gone. We then 

 called out to him to throw down some of the materials of the 

 nest into a sack, and out came a mass consisting of feathers, 

 twigs, bones of defunct creatures, and quantities of maggots 



