FROM SPAIN. 463 
The Griffon Vulture is now carrying out one of those 
great migratory movements observable in the case of so many 
representatives of the animal world. In the course of last 
year whole flocks were repeatedly seen in Northern Hungary, 
Bohemia, and Lower Austria, and single specimens were 
frequently obtained. Nor are they merely longer hunting- 
journeys that this bird is undertaking, but it is its regular 
habitat which it keeps pushing further north. In Carinthia 
and certain parts of Tyrol it already breeds, and it extends its 
excursions in search of plunder as far as the neighbourhood 
of Salzburg with great regularity, there replacing the Bearded 
Vulture, which is already almost extinct. 
Throughout the Iberian peninsula it is the commonest of 
all the raptorial birds, and soars over the snow-fields of the 
highest mountains and the scorching stony wastes of the 
plains in equally large numbers. Excepting in the verdant 
“huertas” of the park-like scenery to be found at Valencia, 
Granada, and Murcia, this bird may be seen everywhere, for 
Spain is the land of the Vulture, and its many lofty Sierras 
offer the very nesting-places that these great raptorial birds 
love, while the desert-like plains lying between the mountains 
serve them as splendid hunting-grounds. 
It is in the best cultivated parts of the country that the 
Griffon Vulture is most uncommon, and these are the districts 
of Barcelona, Valencia, and the whole east coast. In the 
south, on the contrary, from Malaga to the rocky mountains 
about Gibraltar, there stretches a territory well stocked with 
these birds. 
In the immediate neighbourhood of Granada I saw very 
few, and in the Sierra Nevada, which is the special head- 
quarters of the Bearded Vulture in Spain, I found that it 
was very sporadic. On the other hand, the Sierra de Ronda. 
which rises between Granada and Malaga, abounds with them, 
the lofty precipices of this wild limestone range affording 
