WHITE-TAILED EAGLE 129 
being wanting which is so often in Man, and especially 
on its west coast, characteristic of a cliff which does not 
directly overhang the sea. Near the top, however, are one 
or two broad grass-clad ledges, now used by Shags, which 
have littered the ground at the bottom of the cliffs with 
broken heather stems from their nesting materials. To the 
south the sheer coast-line dips into deep water, but to the 
north is a recess which might be called a beach were it not 
that the age-long disintegration of the mountain-side has 
piled it in wild confusion, both above and below high-water 
mark, with boulders of every size and form. The phote- 
graph gives but a faint idea of the magnitude and steepness 
of the precipice, which is almost continuously in shadow. 
An outlying mass of rock prominent near its foot, and 
where the birds used to perch, was known, as Mr. Quayle 
has since informed me, as the ‘ Eagle Rock.’ He had this 
information from his father, who remembered the Eagles ; 
they bred, as he supposed, up to perhaps seventy years ago. 
If Dr. Crellin’s note refers to the same eyrie, and his dates 
be correct, we must put back the limit by fifteen or twenty 
years ; but Ernery could hardly be described as the ‘south 
end of the Isle of Man, and possibly the sheer precipices 
about Spanish Head may have sheltered another pair, or the 
nesting site may have been shifted on account of persecution 
or from some other cause. 
Ernery is in a neighbourhood as secluded and remote as 
any in the Isle of Man, and if the only Manx eyrie existed 
there, this may account for the want of notices of Eagles in 
the island. | 
Mr. Macpherson (Vert. Fauna of Lakeland, p. 190) quotes 
Mrs. Radcliffe as follows: ‘We were told that the Eagles 
have forsaken their aeries in this neighbourhood (Patter- 
dale) and in Borrowdale, and are fied to the Isle of Man’ 
(1794), 
