571 
Ornithology of Cyprus. 
There are at Morphou, Limassol, and in a good many other 
parts of the island, marshes of some extent, where fair wild¬ 
fowl and snipe shooting is obtainable in winter. 
There are approximately a quarter of a million inhabitants. 
The published information concerning the avifauna of 
Cyprus is fairly plentiful. Amongst the constant string ot 
visitors to the island, even during the times of the Lusignan 
Kings, not a few wrote accounts of their travels, and from 
these records * we can occasionally gather stray notes on the 
birds which attracted the attention of the early travellers. 
Thus, about 1336, one learns from a Westphalian cleric that 
a nobleman at the Court of Hugues IV. (the ninth monarch 
of the Lusignan dynasty) kept ten or eleven falconers with 
special pay and allowances; from another legal visitor in 
1394 one gathers that King Jacques I. owned three hundred 
hawks of all kinds; a third gentleman receives from that King 
a gift of one hundred partridges; in 1508 a Tyrolese stranger 
praises the melodious singing of the wild birds ; the doves 
and very fat partridges delight the heart of a priest of Brie 
in 1533. John Locke, an Englishman who visited the 
island in 1553, gives a long and accurate account of the 
Griffon Vulture and the first—so far as I am aware—notice 
of the trade, even then well established, in pickled or 
marinaded “ Beccaficos,” of which he states “ they annually 
send almost 1200 jarres or pots to Venice/’ Many subse¬ 
quent writers refer to this article of diet, still a favourite 
island dainty. 
Quails and Wood-Pigeons figure in a Jew’s letter written 
in 1563, detailing the price of Cyprus commodities. 
From the Seigneur de Villamont of Brittany we learn in 
1589 that it was the practice for the Turkish Pasha of 
Cyprus to commandeer on behalf of the Sultan, under penalty 
of death, all falcons caught by the peasantry on the cliffs ot‘ 
Cape Gata near Limassol—the villagers luring the hawks by 
means of pigeon-decoys and capturing them in net entangle¬ 
ments, and in return for these services living rent and tax 
free. From the same authority we hear of “ red and black 
* ‘ Excerpta Cypria/ by C. D. Cobham, C.M.G. 1908 
2 q 2 
