ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION IN ICELAND. 305 



novelist might make something out of her — and the subject — I 

 think ; it should be a hen one, indeed, for none can praise the 

 female like the female — "this was sometime a paradox, but now 

 the time gives it proof." 



At 5.10 a.m. the male Merlin flies up, and the female out, to 

 meet him, but I both miss her departure — my eye not being upon 

 the ledge at the moment — and fail to see the first meeting. A 

 moment or two later, I see the two birds together, on the side of 

 the mountain, by the ravine. It was either in response to 

 the cry of the male, or she uttered it herself, as she flew 

 off, that the female left the nest. After the first meeting 

 (probably) the male flew about twittering (for the cry is a 

 sort of squeaking twitter, or twittering squeak, and twitter 

 is the prettier word of the two) from point to point of the 

 ravine side, perching now on one and now another, as before. 

 I doubt whether, in this case, any booty was brought in by 

 him for the female. If it was she must have disposed of it 

 very quickly, for she was not engaged with it when I first picked 

 her up on the hillside, and she had nothing in claw or beak 

 when, shortly afterwards, she flew on to the cap of the old 

 Scotchman's head — the pinnacle, that is, of the higher of the 

 two peaks — whence, a moment later, she made a circle on to 

 the ledge of the other, and covered her eggs. She was not, I 

 think, absent five minutes. These two peaks, on a ledge of one 

 of which the nest is situated, stand, as I have said, full in the 

 ravine's path, but, though rising to some height, they are not 

 lofty, as, indeed, the precipitous sides of the gorge, which over- 

 top them upon either side, are not either — they scowl, but do not 

 tower. My tent, therefore — perched upon its own little pinnacle 

 — looks down, from a height of perhaps not more than twenty 

 feet above it, directly on to the small eyrie, but over a chasm — 

 formed by the bursting, as one may call it, of a tributary ravine 

 into the central one — whose width may be about half that 

 number of paces. Such a seat outworths, in my opinion, any 

 throned one — " I would not change it." 



6.10. — For the first time since my own sitting here began, 

 the sitting bird turns round on the nest. She soon comes half 

 back again, however, and, a minute or two afterwards, sits as 

 before. Her tail is turned towards me, and this enables me the 



