BIRDS AT PLAY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOft."1 Sin,—The instances of birds at play which you give in your review of "The Romance of Bird Life" (Spectator, Novem- ber 7th) remind me of a story told me many years ago by a shepherd in the West of Ireland_ The story seems too good and too true to Nature to be an invention. This man's cottage stood near the foot of some great mountain cliffs, above which, on the flat top of the bill, was the peat bog where he cut his year's supply of fuel. It was his custom to stack the turf, when ready for removal to the lower ground, quite near the edge of the cliff. The place happened to be conveniently close to the only path by which a descent was practicable. One season the shepherd noticed that the top of his stack was curiously disturbed. He put it in order, but was surprised a few days later to observe that it was again dis- turbed and some sods removed. The place is very remote; it was clear that the cause must have been something quite unusual. He determined to watch, and this was what he saw. An eagle—of whose haunting the neighbour- hood at the time he was aware—descended on the stack of peat, lifted a sod with his claws, soared upwards to a great height, and then, dropping the sod, swooped down upon it with prodigious speed, and caught it again before it reached the ground. When, after several such flights, the eagle missed his catch, and the sod fell down into the valley, the bird returned to the stack, found another sod, and continued his game. Once on the edge of a very similar range of cliffs I had the rare delight of watching a peregrine teaching her young to fly. A projecting rock on the very brink gave me a point of vantage, and I remember well the rage and fear of the mother and her cries of warning when I put my head over the top of the rock, and looked straight into the splendid eyes of the young falcon as it clung to the face of the cliff. If this was not an instance of birds at play, it was at least a romance
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