FOURTH DAY. 63 
noticed early in the morning, where an Osprey seemed to 
have taken up its abode, but our futile attempts to drive out the 
possible occupant of the nest showed that our hopes were 
ill-founded. 
After a number of shooting misadventures, a keen sports- 
man seizes the smallest prospect afforded him of retrieving 
his failures by a success of some kind; so I even thought of 
the wild geese, and wanted to try to get near them, but 
Hodek thought this would be a perfectly useless attempt. 
On getting back to the old willow, the abandoned dwelling 
of the Hagle-Owl, we determined to take the nest, a trouble- 
some but remunerative task; so I made Ferencz bring my 
craft up to the trunk of a fallen old willow that was only 
partly submerged, for I was obliged to get out, as the men 
required two “csikeln”’ as a first step towards climbing the 
tree, and this prostrate stem was for far and wide the only 
island. I then tried to crawl slowly up its slanting and 
rather slippery surface, and after some trouble and the 
frequent prospect of a cold bath I fortunately succeeded in 
so doing, and seated myself on the gnarled branches furthest 
from the water to watch the taking of the nest. 
Ferencz, who was a particularly clever climber, swung 
himself from the edge of the “ csikel” up the stem of the tree 
with the assistance of the climbing-irons. The upper part of 
the old willow was so broad that he could move quite easily 
along its slanting surface, and on reaching the hole which 
served as the entrance to the nest he felt cautiously inside, 
and first carefully pulled out the newly-killed bodies of four 
Moorhens, which the owl had probably brought this very 
day as food for the young. The bodies were quite intact, 
but, curiously enough, all the heads were gone. We then 
called out to him to throw down some of the materials of the 
nest into a sack, and out came a mass consisting of feathers, 
twigs, bones of defunct creatures, and quantities of maggots 
