396 Unexplored Spain 



cork-oak — such was our hunting-field. 'J'he reader's patience 

 shall not be abused by a catalogue of ornithological fact. True, 

 we were studying bird-problems, and at the moment the writer 

 was endeavouring, amidst ten-foot scrub, to locate by its song, a 

 nest of Polyglotta — or was it Bonellii ? — when in the depths of 

 osmunda fern was descried something hairy — it was a wild-boar 1 

 . . . Three horsemen armed with garrochas come galloping- 

 through the bush — herdsmen rounding-up cattle? But this 

 morning it is a hull they are rounding-up ; and a bull that had 

 grown so savage and intractable that his life was forfeit. A 

 crash in the brushwood and we stand face to face. Three 

 minutes later that bull fell dead with two balls in his body ; 

 but two others, less well aimed, had whistled past our ears. 

 Those three minutes had been momentous — the choice, it had 

 seemed, lay between horn and bullet. Bird-nesting in Spanish 

 wilds has its serious side. 



The afternoon was less eventful. Almost each islanded grove 

 had yielded spoil. We need not specify spectacled, subalpine, and 

 Orphean warblers, woodpeckers, woodchats and grey shrikes, 

 nightjars, owls, kestrels, and kites — some prizes demanding patient 

 watchinof, others a strenuous climb. The last hour had resulted 

 in discovering a nest of booted eagle, two of black, and one of red 

 kites, each with two eggs (the next tree held a nest of the latter 

 containing a youngster near full grown). We had turned to ride 

 homewards when, over a centenarian cork-oak on the horizon, we 

 recognised (by their buoyant flight and white undersides) a pair 

 of serpent-eagles. The grotesque old tree was half overthrown, 

 and on its topmost limb was established the snake-eaters' eyrie, 

 containing the usual single big white egg — this specimen, how- 

 ever, distinctly splashed with reddish brown. In the same tree 

 were also breeding cushats and doves, a woodpecker with four 

 eggs, and a swarm of bees who made things lively for the climber. 

 One of to-day's climbs, by the way, had resulted incidentally iu 

 the capture of a family of dormice, Lii'ones avellanos in Spanish, 

 handsome creatures with immense whiskers and arrayed in 

 contrasts of rich brown, black and white. 



Half an hour later we descried the unmistakable eyrie of an 

 imperial eagle — a platform of sticks that crowned the summit of 

 a huge cork-oak, the more conspicuous since any projecting twigs 

 that might interrupt the view are always broken off. The eagle, 



