. Wild Spain ... records of sport with rifle, rod, and gun, natural history and exploration . t secured. Several common snipe were also shot—thesefacts afford food for reflection ! During the shooting, the air was alive with birds;besides ducks, there were herons of all sorts—old andyoung—egrets, white spoonbills, night-herons—manyyoung ones, brown and speckled like bitterns—togetherwith crested and eared grebes, dabchicks, terns, coots andpratincoles in thousands; while above all, sailed files ofglossy ibis with curious barking croaks, several cormorants,and a string of cranes. Among miscella
. Wild Spain ... records of sport with rifle, rod, and gun, natural history and exploration . t secured. Several common snipe were also shot—thesefacts afford food for reflection ! During the shooting, the air was alive with birds;besides ducks, there were herons of all sorts—old andyoung—egrets, white spoonbills, night-herons—manyyoung ones, brown and speckled like bitterns—togetherwith crested and eared grebes, dabchicks, terns, coots andpratincoles in thousands; while above all, sailed files ofglossy ibis with curious barking croaks, several cormorants,and a string of cranes. Among miscellaneous birds shot were most of the above,with little bitterns, various rails and one purple waterhen,little gulls, whimbrels (?) and bar-tailed godwit. It is worth adding that a dead bird, left floating, wascompletely devoured in less than five minutes by water-beetles (Di/ticKs), which hollowed out the body and leftnothing but empty skin and feathers ! One felt that, hadone the bad luck to get bogged, these creatures werecapable of making aw^ay with a man well under half 428 WILD SPAIN. CHAPTER XXXYIIL DEEE-STALKING AND STILL-HUNTING On the Southern Plains. Though left to the last, the system of mstreando, asit is called in Spanish—stalking or still-hunting, as wehave rendered it in English (though neither expression isperhaps a precise equivalent), affords some of the prettiestsport to be obtained with in the Peninsula. As anexample of this sport, we have taken our latest and notleast successful deer-stalking expedition, which took placein March, 1892—exactly twenty years after the campaignrecorded in the frst chapter (p. 23) of our book. There only remained a few days before the season fordeer-shooting would close. For more than a week we hadbeen ready awaiting a change in the weather; but heavyrains day by day delayed a start. Never had there beenknown so wet a winter. From the Giralda tower atSeville, the whole country appeared a sea, and th
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