A wet winter and flooded marisma--under our eyes float wildfowl in league-long lengths; countless, but far out in open water. By experience we know them to be unassailable. Yet these hosts seem to throw down the gauntlet of defiance at our very doors; and under the reproach of that unspoken challenge experience succumbs. That night we arranged to dispose our six guns over a two-league triangle before the morrow's dawn. After every detail had been fixed, to us our trusted pessimist, Vasquez: "Ni por aqui ni por alli, ni por este lado ni por el otro, ni por ninguna parte cualquiera, no harémos _náda_ por la mañana"--"Neither on this side nor on that, neither to east nor west, nor at any other point whatever, shall we do the slightest good to-morrow!" On reassembling for breakfast, the result worked out as follows: 2 geese, 3 mallard, 29 wigeon, 26 teal, 7 gadwall, 4 shovelers, 1 marbled and 1 tufted duck. Total, 73 head before ten o'clock, besides a curlew and several golden plover, godwits and sundries. We felt fairly satisfied; yet Vasquez's comment ran: "Seventy head among six guns, _eso no es náda_ = that is nothing!" NOTE.--The writer had in his pocket a letter from home: "We put in six days' punt-gunning at the New Year. Frost severe and all conditions favourable. My bag, 4 brent-geese, 2 mallard, 3 wigeon, and a northern diver.--E. H. C." Appendix A SPECIFIC NOTE ON THE WILD-GEESE OF SPAIN The Greylag Goose (_Anser cinereus_) is the only species we need here consider. For of the many hundreds of wild-geese that we have shot and examined during the eighteen years since the publication of _Wild Spain_, every one has proved to be a Greylag. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as an allied form, the Bean-Goose, was supposed in earlier days to occur in Spain, though relatively in small numbers. Col. Irby estimated the Bean-Geese as one to 200 of the Greylags; but no such proportion any longer exists, at least in the delta of the Guadalquivir, where, during eighteen years, hardly a single Bean-Goose has been obtained.[72] This abandonment of southern Spain by the Bean-Goose (presuming it was ever found therein) appears inexplicable. The species has lately been recognised as divisible into various races or subspecies (differing chiefly in the form and colour of the beak),[73] for which reason it may here be recorded that of the few Bean-Geese examined twenty years ago in Spain, the beak was invariably dark to below the nasal orifice, with a dark tip, and an intermediate band of rufous-chestnut.