FROM SPAIN. 461 



young one that we took out of the nest. One of my acquaint- 

 ances, too, who for more than twenty years has been hunting 

 after birds of prey in Spain, has only killed one Bearded 

 Vulture during the whole of that period, and for that success 

 he was indebted to a chance encounter during the winter. 



All the hunters of the Sierra Nevada told me that the 

 Bearded Vulture still exists among the Sierras, but that it has 

 become rarer, and that I fully believe. An equally persistent 

 pursuit of it has quite put an end to the breeding of this 

 noble bird in our Austrian Alps ; and in Switzerland also its 

 existence has almost become a matter of history. This will, 

 sooner or later, be the case in Spain, for the herdsmen dislike 

 it as a neighbour and try to destroy its nest, or at any rate to 

 scare away the old birds, and only a few days before my arrival 

 they demolished one of its abodes by throwing stones at it. 



The common occurrence of the Bearded Vulture in Spain, 

 to which even some books testify, is, therefore, quite out of the 

 question ; and when Howard Saunders, in his ' Catalogue des 

 Oiseaux du midi de 1'Espagne,' which he laid before the 

 Societe Zoologique de France, in speaking of the Gypaetus 

 barbatus, says : " Un ou deux couples se trouvent sedentaires 

 dans toutes les montagnes, mais c'est dans la Sierra Nevada 

 que ce beau rapace devient presque abondant," he is altogether 

 wrong, and if his statement was founded on any observations 

 at all they must have been very faulty. 



