Curiously, we noticed woodlarks up here, while blackstarts abounded as titlarks on a Northumbrian moor. In an ivy-clad gorge at 4200 feet we found two nearly completed nests in rock crevices: one occupied a vertical fissure that needed quite twelve inches of packed moss to provide a foundation, the cup-shaped nest being superimposed. But it was not till a month later (April 24) that these birds were laying in earnest.
At 5000 feet the “Piorno” (Spartius scorpius) began to grow, a red-stemmed shrub, known locally as Leche-interna, and on breaking it, the twigs are found to be filled with a milky fluid that justifies the name. The piorno we have never found growing except on the high tops of Grédos and other lofty sierras, where it forms a chief food of the Spanish ibex, its presence being, in fact, always associated with that of the wild-goat. Alas! that here, on San Cristobal, that association has been severed—another instance of the heedless improvidence that marks the Spanish race. Fifteen years ago they destroyed the last ibex; fifteen years hence they will have destroyed the last pinsápo!
Once for brief moments a broad-horned head, peering over the topmost crags, lent joyous hope that after all an ibex or two might yet survive. But the intruder proved to be one of the dark-brown rams of Ovis bidens that, in semi-feral state, roam these peaks.
San Cristobal itself now holds no big game; though ibex are found but a few leagues to the eastward, and, we rejoice to add (on certain sierras where protection is afforded them), begin to increase. The Serranía de Ronda, like Neváda, of which it is an extension, has never held either boar or deer; both are too rocky and precipitous to shelter those animals, though both boar and roe are found in the lower hills towards Jerez.
Just below the highest peak, the Cumbre de San Cristobal, lies a curious little alpine meadow. It is only forty yards square, and while we rested, lunching, on unaccustomed level a golden eagle swept overhead, chased and hustled by a mob of choughs that colonise these crags. Ten minutes later a lammergeyer afforded a second glorious spectacle, speeding through space on pinions rigidly motionless, but strongly reflexed, as is usual on a descending gradient. Only once, as far as eye could follow, was one great wing gently deflected, and that merely from the “wrist.”
On reaching a crest above, two lammergeyers appeared, the first carrying a long stick or thin bone athwart his beak; the second held a course direct to where L. sat on the ridge, coming so near that the rustle of huge wings sounded menacingly and the white head, golden breast, and hoary shoulders showed clear as in a picture. We expected to find the eyrie somewhere hard by, but in this we were mistaken—once more. It was not on that hill, nor the next; but on a third![60]
We discovered the nest of our friends, the golden eagles. It was situate quite two miles away, in a vertical pulpit-shaped rock-stack, that stood forth in a terribly steep scree. From a cavern in the face of this (prettily overhung by a clump of red-berried mistletoe) flew the male eagle. From below, the eyrie was accessible to within a dozen feet; but that interval proved impassable. In the evening we returned with the rope, and having made this fast above, L. was about to ascend from below, when the man left in charge at the top (probably misunderstanding his instructions) let all go, and down came the rope clattering at our feet! It was too late to rectify the blunder that night, and a month elapsed ere we would revisit the spot. Then this curious result ensued. The eagles, we found, had so bitterly resented the indignity of a rope having been (even momentarily) stretched athwart their portals that they had abandoned their stronghold, leaving two handsome eggs, partly incubated. Their eyrie was eight feet deep, its entrance partly overgrown with ivy and (as above mentioned) overhung by red-berried mistletoe growing on a wild-cherry—the nest built of sticks, lined with esparto, and adorned with green ivy-leaves and twigs of pinsápo.
The golden eagle is still common, ornamenting with majestic flight every sierra in Spain. For eagles are notoriously difficult to kill, and, when killed, cannot be eaten; so the goat-herd, with characteristic apathy and Arab fatalism, suffers the ravages on his kids and contents himself with an oath. Only once have we found a nest in a tree; it was a giant oak, impending a ravine so precipitous that from the eyrie you could drop a pebble into a torrent 200 feet below. Usually their nests are in the crags, vast accumulations of sticks conspicuously projecting, and generally in pairs, perhaps 100 yards apart, and which are occupied in alternate years. Eggs are laid by mid-March, but the young hardly fly before June. It was in this sierra that we made the sketches of golden eagles from life, here and at p. 317.