The Zoologist — Apkil, 1873. 3483 



I pass on to the golden eagle, and concerning this monarch of 

 Scottish birds I find details of great interest. In 1862 Mr. Knox 

 passed a week or ten days in the forest of Braemar, in the very 

 heart of the Grampians, and had the gratification of seeing this 

 royal bird almost daily, and of observing peculiarities which have 

 escaped the notice of ornithologists generally ; for instance, his 

 hovering like a kestrel, and his nesting in fir trees, or as Mr. Knox 

 would prefer calling them " primaeval pines." He first saw the 

 golden eagle soaring at a great height, and every now and then 

 arresting his career and hovering in the air like a kestrel, apparently 

 watching for some victim in the heather below : he was attended 

 by a " rabble rout" of hooded crows, who kept up their pertinacious 

 annoyance as long as he remained in view. Braemar was once the 

 paradise of the naturalist, but it is now forbidden ground; for one 

 cannot write half-a-dozen lines about this wild district without 

 making the "angry passions rise" of those who would wander and 

 those who would prevent from wandering. A tourist in the wilder 

 parts of Scotland must now lie submissive in the arms of gillies, 

 foresters, keepers and rangers, et id yenus omne, as does an infant 

 in the arms of its nurse ; or must submit to the bullying and 

 badgering that no Englishman can relish; but I return to the eagles 

 and Mr. Knox. 



" My surprise, however, was not greater than my delight when the forester 

 pointed out the royal uest on an old Scotch fir tree, which, with several 

 others, at some distance from each other, studded the side of a bill near 

 the base of Ben-y-Bourd. Every ornithological authority that I was 

 acquainted with had invariably assigned lofty inland crags and precipices 

 to the golden eagle as the situation of his eyrie; and, indeed, the high 

 cliff behind Coi-riemulzie, where he used to breed, owes its present title 

 to the circumstance, but this was the only instance I had ever known of 

 the nest being constructed in a tree. Such is the result of preservation, 

 or in other words, the absence of persecution, for the services of the eagle 

 have been long appreciated and the birds themselves protected by the 

 proprietor of the forest, so that it would really appear as if the establishment 

 of confidence had rendered them less anxious to select an inaccessible 

 position for their eyrie. The nest itself was not above twenty feet from the 

 ground, built on one of the larger horizontal branches extending from the 

 naked trunk; and with the assistance of a gillie I succeeded in climbing to 

 it and examined its structure and contents. The enormous fabric was about 

 eight feet wide. Some of the external sticks of which it was composed were 

 nearly as thick as my wrist, their size gradually diminishing towards the 



