396 Unexplored Spain 
cork-oak—such was our hunting-field. The 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 Bonellaw?—when in the depths of 
osmunda fern was descried something havry—it was a wild-boar ! 
. Three horsemen armed with garrochas come galloping 
through the bush—herdsmen rounding-up cattle? But this 
morning it is a bull 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 
watching, 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 ful] 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 
egos, and a swarm or bees who made things lively for the climber. 
One of to-day’s climbs, by the way, had resulted incidentally in 
the capture of a family of dormice, Lirones 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, 
