ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION IN ICELAND. 95 



may have been owing to this merely that the male seemed 

 always to wait for the female to dive, and, shortly, to follow her. 

 What is really waited for is, I believe, the requisite breathing 

 space, so that, with this regularity, a pair would tend to 

 precede or follow one another, according to which one bad first 

 gone down. 



June 8th. — At about 4 a.m., when I look, I can see no bird 

 on the nest. At 6.30 the head and yellow beak are plainly 

 visible. At 7, and now, again, at 7.10, I do not see them. 



About half an hour after this, I catch a glimpse of one of the 

 Eagles on a projecting, rocky bastion of the cliffs, from which he 

 appears to leap down, and I lose him. A little afterwards I see 

 him, or the other one, flying across the lake. It is a perfectly 

 still, calm morning, the sky everywhere obscured under a high- 

 hanging canopy of white or grey clouds, yet still bright— the lake 

 a dead calm. Accordingly, the Eagle, in crossing it, flaps quite 

 heavily. He flies low ; a Gull thinks it worth his while to follow 

 and demonstrate against him. 



A little while after this — towards 8 a.m. — there is a great 

 noise and clamouring, and I catch a sight of both the Eagles on 

 a distant, rocky headland, yet not so distant but that, a moment 

 afterwards, the glasses give me a fine view of them. One of the 

 two, which I judge to be the male, seems to be making all the 

 clamour. He throws up his head in exactly the way that a Gull 

 — say, a Great Black-backed Gull — does, and utters a series of 

 cries which may be very fairly rendered in this way: " Quee, 

 quee, quee, quee, quee — pudja, pudja, pudja, pudja, pudja " — 

 cries which I have heard, several times, during the early morning, 

 without being able to affix them. The last of the two sounds 

 has a guttural intonation, is strongly uttered, and really does 

 bear a considerable resemblance to the word by which I have 

 rendered it — to my own ears, at least. The " quee " which pre- 

 cedes it is that small, squeaking note which seems common to 

 the birds of prey — Sparrow-Hawk, Kestrel, Buzzard, Merlin, 

 &c, all have it. Of course the strength of the sound is greater 

 here, conformably with the greater size of the bird — still, it is a 

 thin and weak one, for that size. Here also " quee " (or " ee") 

 seems to me a fairly just rendering of the note. These cries of 

 the Eagle seem to exasperate, make mad, the pair of little 



