This dry spring not a spoonbill nested in Andalucia. The teeming _pajaréras_, or heronries, at the Rocina de la Madre and in Doñana were left lifeless and abandoned. In normal years these are tenanted (as shown in photo at p. 32) by countless multitudes of buff-backed, squacco, and night-herons, glossy ibis, some purple herons, and a few pairs of spoonbills, whose massed nests fairly weigh down the marsh-girt tamarisks. [Illustration: ORPHEAN WARBLER (_Sylvia orphea_) Arrives end of April; hardly so brilliant a songster as its specific title would import.] CHAPTER XL SKETCHES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE Spain is a land where one can enjoy seeing in their everyday life those "rare" British birds that at home can only be seen in books or museums. So far as it can be done in half-a-dozen brief sketches, we will endeavour to illustrate this. I. AN EVENING'S STROLL FROM JEREZ. Spanish towns and villages are self-contained like the "fenced cities" of Biblical days. The _pueblecitos_ of the sierra show up as a concrete splash of white on the brown hillside. Once outside the gates you are in the _campo_ = the country. Even Jerez with its 60,000 inhabitants boasts no suburban zone. Within half an hour's walk one may witness scenes in wild bird-life for the like of which home-staying naturalists sigh in vain. We are at our "home-marsh," a mile or two away: it is mid-February. Within fifteen yards a dozen stilts stalk in the shallows; hard by is a group of godwits, some probing the ooze, the rest preening in eccentric outstretched poses. Beyond, the drier shore is adorned by snow-white egrets (_Ardea bubulcus_), some perched on our cattle, relieving their tick-tormented hides. Thus, within less than fifty yards, we have in view three of the rarest and most exquisite of British birds. And the list can be prolonged. A marsh-harrier in menacing flight, his broad wings brushing the bulrushes, sweeps across the bog, startling a mallard and snipes; there are storks and whimbrels in sight (the latter possibly slender-billed curlew), and a pack of lesser bustard crouch within 500 yards in the palmettos. From a marsh-drain springs a green sandpiper; and as we take our homeward way, serenaded by bull-frogs and mole-crickets, there resounds overhead the clarion-note of cranes cleaving their way due north. II. AN ISOLATED CRAG IN ANDALUCIA