188 WILD SPAIN. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



EXPERIENCES WITH EAGLES. 

 I. — Forest and Plain. 



With her vast expanses of sierra and lonely scrub- 

 clad wastes, scarcely inhabited save by ill-tended herds 

 of cattle or goats, but abounding in wild-life — furred, 

 feathered, and scaled — Spain affords conditions peculiarly 

 favourable to raptorial animals. Of the eagle-tribe some 

 eight or nine species are recognized as belonging to the 

 Spanish avi-fauna — some peculiar to the mountain-region, 

 others to the steppe and prairie, as we now proceed to 

 explain. We have ourselves shot all the different kinds 

 of eagle, save two, which are comparatively scarce and 

 irregular stragglers to the Peninsula — namely, Haliatetus 

 albicilla and Aq. ncevia. 



The first of the tribe to attract our attention was the 

 Spanish Imperial Eagle (Aquila adalherti of E. Brehm), 

 one of the handsomest of European species, a few pairs 

 of which still inhabit most of the wilder provinces of 

 Central and Southern Spain, though their numbers in 

 Andalucia have been grievously reduced since we first met 

 with them in 1872. To shoot this bird was long an ambi- 

 tion of the writer, the attainment of which cost many a 

 long week of hard work, hard fare, and more than one 

 bitter disappointment. All attempts in those earlier days 

 to approach the Imperial Eagle on the open plains which 

 form its favourite home proved futile; though on many 

 occasions we fell in with the bird conspicuously perched, 

 according to its habit during the mid-day heats, on some 

 dead tree or the top of a pine. In later years we have 



