5274 Birds. 



standing on the bridge, in the midst of a pelting rain, admiring the 

 grand but awful scenery, when a flash of lightning, accompanied in- 

 stantaneously with a tremendous clap of thunder, which seemed to 

 shake the very bridge on which we were standing, made us start from 

 our places, while it added tenfold to the awfulness and grandeur of 

 the scene ; but indeed the whole vale from Altdorf, where Tell defied 

 Gessler, and shot the apple from his boy's head, to Andermatt, where 

 we found the Reuss breaking its banks and washing away several cot- 

 tages and a farm, to the dismay of their terrified owners, was a succes- 

 sion of such scenes of Nature, in all her most majestic and imposing 

 aspects, as, partly from being the first views of the bird 1 had seen, 

 and partly from their intrinsic grandeur, heightened by the storms I 

 have described, will never fade from my memory ; and it was in this 

 scenery, and during a gleam of sunshine between the storms, that a 

 nutcracker flew across the road, and obligingly perched on a branch of 

 a tree by the roadside, not twenty yards distant, where he remained 

 very uncomposedly, while I had ample time to admire his compact 

 robust figure, and his active, quick motions, his strong sharp beak, and 

 his peculiar mottled plumage of brown and white, ere he caught sight 

 of me, and hurried away out of sight among the trees. The second 

 occasion of my meeting with the bird was in 1851, in very different 

 scenery, not half so wild, but very beautiful, on the borders of the 

 Tyrol, near the Engadine Pass, where, though the mountains were 

 high, they were well clothed with forests at their feet, and the valley 

 was one of those smiling sunny scenes of fertility and industry often to 

 be seen in the broader vales : and here again the nutcracker very con- 

 siderately came close to where 1 was resting on a bank, and remained, 

 hopping from branch to branch, dressing his feathers, and quite at his 

 ease for above five minutes, not the least aware what eager and prying 

 eyes were watching his every movement, and that only the power, 

 though not the will, was wanting to make him my prize. I think 

 myself particularly fortunate in having seen these two nutcrackers, 

 because so many olher English tourists, keen observers of birds too, 

 have come back disappointed at not meeting with one, but I imagine 

 them to be tolerably abundant in the country, from the testimony of 

 more than one observer of birds. 



Great Black Woodpecker (Picus martius). Though I never saw 

 with my own eyes this fine bird alive in Switzerland, yet my com- 

 panion with whom I was walking did, and though I came up to him 

 the minute after he had seen the bird, and rushed into the wood in 

 pursuit the instant I heard his account, 1 could not gain a sight of him 



