Cistus and tree-heath, genista and purple heather that brushes your shoulder as you ride, studded with groves of cork-oak--such was our hunting-field. The reader's patience shall not be abused by a catalogue of ornithological fact. True, we were studying bird-problems, and at the moment the writer was endeavouring, amidst ten-foot scrub, to locate by its song, a nest of Polyglotta--or was it _Bonellii_?--when in the depths of osmunda fern was descried something _hairy_--it was a wild-boar!... Three horsemen armed with _garrochas_ come galloping through the bush--herdsmen rounding-up cattle? But this morning it is a _bull_ they are rounding-up; and a bull that had grown so savage and intractable that his life was forfeit. A crash in the brushwood and we stand face to face. Three minutes later that bull fell dead with two balls in his body; but two others, less well aimed, had whistled past our ears. Those three minutes had been momentous--the choice, it had seemed, lay between horn and bullet. Bird-nesting in Spanish wilds has its serious side. The afternoon was less eventful. Almost each islanded grove had yielded spoil. We need not specify spectacled, subalpine, and orphean warblers, woodpeckers, woodchats and grey shrikes, nightjars, owls, kestrels, and kites--some prizes demanding patient watching, others a strenuous climb. The last hour had resulted in discovering a nest of booted eagle, two of black, and one of red kites, each with two eggs (the next tree held a nest of the latter containing a youngster near full grown). We had turned to ride homewards when, over a centenarian cork-oak on the horizon, we recognised (by their buoyant flight and white undersides) a pair of serpent-eagles. The grotesque old tree was half overthrown, and on its topmost limb was established the snake-eaters' eyrie, containing the usual single big white egg--this specimen, however, distinctly splashed with reddish brown. In the same tree were also breeding cushats and doves, a woodpecker with four eggs, and a swarm of bees who made things lively for the climber. One of to-day's climbs, by the way, had resulted incidentally in the capture of a family of dormice, _Lirones avellanos_ in Spanish, handsome creatures with immense whiskers and arrayed in contrasts of rich brown, black and white.