562 ORNITHOLOGICAL SKETCHES 



All high mountains have certain common characteristics, 

 and so the Retyezat may perhaps remind travellers of the Alps; 

 yet in many respects one might call it a blending of the 

 Central-European Alps, the Balkans, the mountains of the 

 Karst, and in its lower parts also of the Hungarian Carpa- 

 thians, while in some of its deep glens, whose lofty sides are 

 clothed with deciduous woods up to a great height, I found a 

 resemblance and often even an exact likeness to the mountains 

 of the north-west provinces of Spain, and to those of no other 

 range that I have ever visited. 



The hills of this chain also exhibit many evidences of their 

 southerly position and their connection with the great group 

 of the South-European highlands. This struck me most 

 forcibly in the distribution of the vegetation. The zone of 

 the oaks reaches a long way up, even on to the steep heights. 

 Then come regular woods of birches mixed with Scotch firs, 

 and succeeded by enormous beech-forests, which give place to 

 white and common spruces. Not until these have attained their 

 limit does the Siberian cedar appear in conjunction with a 

 few creeping pines, and where trees of a high habit of growth 

 are no longer found there extend the great regions of the 

 cliffs, the bare stony slopes, and the impenetrable thickets 

 of creeping pine with, singularly enough, a sprinkling of 

 juniper bushes. All these zones, too, are not narrow belts, 

 but broad virgin forests ; and these mountains are not subject 

 to the rules which apply to the northern Alps, such as 

 those of North Styria and Upper Austria, for at the elevation 

 where the poor scattered spruces of the latter tail off among 

 the creeping pines there are in the Transylvanian Alps the 

 most luxuriant oak-woods, and instead of the bare rocks 

 and nothing else which confront the traveller at about 4000 

 feet, we here have forests of beech and a growth of spruces 

 reaching as high as 6000 to 7000 feet. This is indicative of a 

 southerly position, for where the woods are not destroyed 



