omit them, in order to ascend with him into the Alpine region, and
observe a class of birds very different from any as yet referred to. In
the Oberland, some thousand feet higher than we have hitherto been, we
come upon the eagle and the vulture. There the osprey soars over summits
twelve thousand feet high, or is seen, at a less elevation, bearing away
a lamb or a hare to his hungry eaglets in their inaccessible eyrie.
Scarcely anything that runs or flies is safe from his clutches. He
overtakes the swiftest birds, snatches their prey from hawk and falcon,
and will carry off a dog, a fox, or a badger, as readily as a kid or a
barn-door fowl. It has been sometimes denied that this kind of eagle
carries off children, but he is unquestionably strong enough and
courageous enough to do so, and Dr Tschudi vouches for one painful case
of the kind as having occurred in the Grisons. “In a mountain village,
an osprey darted upon a child of two years old, and bore it off. The
father came running up at the cries of the infant, and followed the
robber into the rocks. The burthen being rather a heavy one, he
succeeded, after great exertions, in making the eagle resign its prey.
But the poor child’s eyes had been hacked out, and it soon died. Long
did the father lie in wait for the murderer, which was continually
hovering about that neighbourhood, and at last he caught him alive in a
fox-trap. In his eagerness and fury he laid hold of his prize so
imprudently that the bird wounded him severely with his beak and with
the foot that was free. Some neighbours came up and killed the eagle
with sticks.” The village of Eblingen, by the lake of Brienz in the
Bernese Oberland, is celebrated for its eagle hunts. About a league from
it, in a very wild and beautiful part of the mountains, is a favourite
abiding-place of the ospreys, where they love to sit upon the sunny side
of inaccessible peaks, and look out over the great valley of the lakes.
The Eblinger hunters wage perpetual war against them, and attract them
to the neighbourhood, as an angler ground-baits for fish, by hanging
dead cattle and other carrion to the trees. This is in summer; and as
the eagle can then usually get better food, he often disdains the
garbage. In winter the hunters place their baits upon the ground,
securing them with wooden pegs. Roasted cats are the best bait. The
eagle cannot rise from the flat ground so rapidly as he can fly off a
more elevated perch; and moreover, when he once settles down to a
repast, he often remains for hours at it. The baits are so placed as to
be visible, through field-glasses, from the village below. The hunters,
with whom this kind of sport is a passion, are continually at their
windows, watching the snare. When they see an eagle settle down to his
food, they set out, and although they have a full league to climb
through bushes and over rocks, the bird seldom escapes them. The highly
picturesque vicinity of Eblingen is disfigured, in the eyes of the
traveller who wanders thither, by such unpleasing sights as a putrid
goat hanging from a tree and dangling in the wind; here a horse’s head,
partially picked, and there a half-eaten cat. The strength of this kind
of eagle is very considerable. One was known to fly away with a
fox-trap, weighing eight pounds, in which he had been caught. But a more
powerful and formidable, although a less intelligent and kingly bird, is
the _lämmergeier_ or vulture—the condor of European mountains, and
unquestionably the most remarkable feathered inhabitant of the Alps.
With the exception of the chapters relating to the chamois and
chamois-hunters, the one allotted to the vulture is the most interesting
of Dr Tschudi’s book. Concerning this largest of European birds of prey
naturalists knew little until very recently. The great Buffon himself
confounded it with the condor. The Swiss naturalist Steinmüller was the
first who gave a good account of it; others followed, and extended their
researches farther, but much yet remains to be ascertained. In the book
before us Dr Tschudi has made a valuable addition to the natural history
of this obscene and dangerous bird, of which he relates numerous
anecdotes, partly the result of personal observation, partly derived
from experienced hunters and scientific friends. We will give the cream
of two or three pages.
“The internal construction of this gigantic bird is most peculiar. The
muscles of the breast are extraordinarily large and strong; the long
bones, hollow as in other birds, become filled, by the action of the
lungs, with air, which, being warm, is specifically lighter than the
external atmosphere, and facilitates the bird’s flight. His digestive
organs are singularly powerful. His acrid gastric juice corrodes and
disposes of the largest bones. When one of these birds is killed, the
contents of the stomach astounds everybody. Thus in one vulture was
found a fox’s rib, 15 inches long, the entire tail of a fox, the hind
leg of a hare, several shoulder-blade bones, and a ball of hair. The
greatest discovery of this kind, however, was in the stomach of a
vulture killed by Dr Schinz: it contained the large hip-bone of a cow, a
chamois’ shin-bone 6½ inches long, and a half-digested rib of the same
animal, numerous smaller bones, a quantity of hair, and a heathcock’s
claws. The gastric juice decomposes the bones by strata or layers, so as
to get from them the nutritive gelatine, whilst the dead chalky part
passes away. By this organisation, Nature, in her wisdom, has restricted
the mischief the vulture might otherwise do. For if his great need of
nourishment had to be satisfied by masses of flesh, not only would the
bird often die of hunger, but he would exterminate all the game in the
upper Alps. He digests the thick hoofs of calves and cows; and the
gastric juice continues its operation even after death.” Thus, in a
vulture shot in the act of devouring a fox, and opened three days
afterwards, the fox’s head was found in the usual state of digestive
fermentation—a remarkable example, says Dr Tschudi, of independence of
action between heart and stomach.
The habits of the Alpine vulture are not such as to render their
observation an easy or a very safe occupation. In the morning he usually
flies off to the place where he last found a meal, and, suspending
himself at a great height, examines his hunting-ground. His scent and
sight are alike excellent, and he detects his prey a league off. Below
him the Alpine animals graze and repose, unsuspicious of the fatal cloud
overhanging them. Suddenly the vulture folds his wings, and falls like a
shot upon his victim. If this be a small animal—a dog, a lamb, a badger,
a hare—he perhaps carries it off; larger prey he is fain to devour upon
the spot; for this bird’s strength lies less in his feet and claws than
in his wings and beak. “If he descries a large animal, a heavy sheep, an
old chamois or goat, grazing in the neighbourhood of a precipice, he
circles round and round it, trying to torment and terrify it, until it
runs to the edge of the precipice; then he plumps upon it with a rushing
flight, and not unfrequently succeeds in knocking it over the cliff. He
flies down after it, and settles upon his prey, killed by the fall.
First he pecks out the eyes, then eats the entrails, then the bones. He
crushes the skull of living cats, and bolts them at a mouthful. He has
often been known to attempt to throw hunters down a precipice, when he
found them in a dangerous position on a narrow mountain-path or rocky
promontory; and those who have been thus assailed declare that the rush,
the swiftness, and the power of the enormous pinions are almost
irresistible, even by a man. In like manner a vulture was seen to
attempt to throw an ox down a steep cliff close to which it had strayed.
The bird obstinately persisted in his daring attacks; but the quadruped
was not easy to scare out of his natural tranquillity. Lowering his
head, he planted himself firmly on his solid legs and waited quietly,
until the vulture became satisfied that the case was hopeless.”
In Piedmont, the country people decoy the vulture into a narrow pit, by
means of a roast cat or some other carrion. He eats his fill, has
difficulty in rising, and is beaten to death with sticks. The Indians in
the Andes kill condors by dozens in the same manner. It is hard to get
near enough to the vulture to shoot him: he is caught in fox-traps; and
there is a price upon his head in Switzerland. In the Grisons, the
successful hunter carries his prize from house to house, to claim
reward, and the peasants are generally willing to bestow a little wool
and many thanks upon the captor of the sheep-destroyer. Now and then the
vulture catches a Tartar. Dr Tschudi tells an instance of this, of his
own knowledge. Near Alpnach, in Unterwalden, hard by the place called
the Dragon’s Hole, a vulture picked up a fox and flew away with it. But
Reynard managed to seize the spoiler by the neck, and bit it right
through. The bird came tumbling dead to the ground, and the fox limped
away, after an aerial excursion he was not likely soon to forget. One
has heard of weasels playing a similar trick to hawks; but a fight in
the air between a full-grown fox and the largest European bird of prey
must be a sight worth seeing.
Dr Tschudi relates several instances of children being carried off by
vultures, and one of the almost miraculous recovery of a little girl
thus abducted, and who thereafter went by the name of Geier-Anne. The
remarkable event was noted in the church-register of the village in the
Bernese Oberland, near which it occurred, and its heroine was alive a
few years ago. The only case in which the vulture will fight, to the
very death, against adult men, is when these attempt to rob its nest.
Thus, one day, in the canton of Glarus, a resin-gatherer saw a nest high
up in the rocks, climbed to it with prodigious labour, found two young
fledged vultures (breakfasting on a squirrel, which they had not taken
the trouble to skin), tied their feet, threw them over his shoulder, and
had begun his descent, when the young birds’ cries brought back the old
ones, who furiously attacked him. It was only by continually swinging
his axe round his head that he kept them off; and they continued to
follow and rage around him till he reached the village of Schwanden,
four leagues off. “The celebrated chamois-hunter, Joseph Scherrer, of
Ammon, on the Wallensee, once climbed, barefoot and with a gun on his
back, to a nest in which he suspected there were young. Before he
reached it, the male eagle flew by and was shot. Scherrer reloaded and
continued his ascent. But on reaching the nest the female bird fell
furiously upon him, seized him by the hips with her claws, endeavoured
to hurl him from the rock, and dealt him severe blows with her beak. The
man’s position was desperate. He was compelled to cling with all his
strength to the precipice, and could not use his gun. His extraordinary
presence of mind saved him. With one hand he directed the muzzle of his
weapon against the breast of the bird that grappled him, and with his
naked toe he cocked the piece and pulled the trigger. The eagle fell
dead amongst the rocks. For the two old and the two young birds the
hunter received five florins and a-half reward; but he kept the deep
scars upon his arm as long as he lived.
“Quite as frightful was the position of a Sardinian, who went with two
of his brothers to rob a vulture’s nest in the mountains of Eglesias.
His companions let him down by a rope, as is often done in our country,
to get at places inaccessible by climbing. Suspended over a tremendous
precipice, he took the young birds from the nest. At that moment the two
old ones attacked him like furies. The young Sardinian had a sword, and
kept them off by unceasingly brandishing it round his head. Suddenly he
felt a violent shaking of the rope, and perceived, to his horror, that,
in the ardour of his defence, he had cut it three parts through. Each
moment he expected the remaining strands to sever; each movement he made
might hurl him into the abyss below. He was slowly and cautiously drawn
up and rescued.”
These striking anecdotes are followed by an extremely curious account of
the habits of a vulture captured when full grown (young birds are easily
reared and tamed), by the Swiss Professor Scheitlin, and kept in a room
until his death. But it is time to quit the Swiss birds for the Swiss
beasts, if we are to say anything about the latter, which, although
fewer in number, occupy very considerable space in the doctor’s book.
“Upon the whole,” says Dr Tschudi, “our country, and especially our
beloved mountain-land, seems by no means unfavourable to the propagation
of mammalia—great forests, extensive wastes, almost inaccessible
mountain-districts—but on nearer examination their advantage greatly
dwindles. Everywhere cultivation strides victoriously forward; our woods
are thinned and frequented; the herd and the hunter intrude into the
wild mountain-valleys!” And the enthusiastic naturalist seems disposed
to lament such cultivation and intrusion. He has rambled in Alpine
solitude and Peruvian _puñas_, until he has acquired somewhat of the
feeling with which Cooper’s Pioneer beheld law and ploughshares
encroaching upon his beloved forest, where the only law and the best
breadwinner had long been a long rifle and a sure aim. “Where man comes
tormenting (_mit seiner Qual_),” says the worthy Tschudi, whom we expect
to hear of next from the Far West, if Californian discoveries have not
made that too cultivated and populous a country for him, “not only does
nature cease to breed new animals, but those long since bred diminish
and disappear.... Once the beaver built his wonderful dwelling upon our
rivers; the wild ox stamped down the bushes in our woods; the wild boar
grubbed holes at the foot of our venerable oaks. Every trace of these
animals has disappeared. But a century since, the fallow-deer was a
native of our forests. How seldom now does a wild boar make its way
hither from Alsatia, affording a noble mark to our rifle-bullets; how
rarely does one hear that a hunted stag, hard beset in the Black Forest,
has swam the Rhine, and shown himself in our woods! On the other hand,
not all the efforts that have been made have rid us of dangerous beasts
of prey, and for scores of years to come, although we may lessen their
numbers, we shall not succeed in exterminating them. The mountains
favour and shelter them, and our lynxes, bears, and wolves will long
continue their nocturnal expeditions through the Alps, whilst in
adjacent Germany they have for many years been exterminated.” Although
cherishing succulent and savoury reminiscences of the rich black meat—a
sort of pig-venison—on which we have so often banqueted when abiding
hard by the forests of “adjacent Germany,” we still must question the
desirableness of wild boars as habitual residents in an agricultural
country, or even as casual visitors from neighbouring mountains. Dr
Tschudi has drawn quite a Druidical picture of Tusky rooting at the foot
of oaks which were probably already saplings in days when bread was
hardly deemed a necessary of life, and when robber-knights washed down
with quarts of Rhenish the meat they that morning had speared. Doubtless
these were fine carnivorous times, and if a husbandman dared complain of
ravaged fields, the whip—perhaps the halter—was ready for the scurvy
knave. But we would beg Dr Tschudi to descend from the mountain’s summit
into the valley below, and to inquire the wine and corn grower’s private
opinion on the subject of wild pigs. We are convinced it would be
strongly in favour of the total extermination of an animal which,
although not quite as dangerous to man as some of the ferocious
quadrupeds so prettily designed upon the ornamental cover of the
doctor’s book, is about as bad an enemy as the farmer can have. As to
bears, wildcats, and the other Carnivora, whose permanence in the
mountains of Switzerland the doctor deplores, it is not likely they will
ever be entirely got rid of; but, upon the whole, the damage they do is
decidedly inconsiderable, and their descent into the plain of rare
occurrence. One might certainly encounter pleasanter-looking creatures
in a morning’s walk than this flat-headed, big-clawed lynx, that snarls
so fiercely at a bear, covetous of the chamois Bruin holds beneath his
paw; or than the fierce wild-cat—no bad imitation of a panther—which,
when assailed, makes such good fight against dog and man. This beast
loves to lie all day upon the bough of a tree, whence she springs upon
her prey: there the hunter often spies her, and then, if he chooses to
meddle with her, he does well to take good aim. If she be but wounded,
down she comes, foaming and snorting, with a high back and a
perpendicular tail, and springs upon her assailant. She strikes her
sharp claws so deep into the flesh, especially on the breast, that it is
very difficult to tear her off, and such wounds are hard to heal. She
fears dogs so little, that she often, before perceiving the hunter,
comes down from the tree to encounter them. Then terrible fights ensue.
The furious cat tears deep rents with her claws, aiming by preference at
the dog’s eyes, and defends herself with ferocious obstinacy, so long as
a spark of her very tenacious life remains. Thus did a wild-cat, one day
in the Jura, contend victoriously with three dogs. She struck her claws
deep into the nose of two of them, and her teeth firmly into the throat
of the third—a mode of defence evincing not only prodigious courage and
inconceivable dexterity, but also great sagacity, since only in that
manner could she avoid being bitten by the dogs. The hunter hurried up,
and, by a shot through the body, killed her, and rescued his dogs, whom
she otherwise would assuredly have defeated. This really formidable
beast is getting daily scarcer in Switzerland, but is said to be still
pretty common in the Black Forest, where Dr Tschudi recently saw a very
fine specimen, weighing upwards of sixteen pounds. The lynx—still found,
although rarely, in various of the Alpine regions of Switzerland (where
he abides, not from any particular love of a cool temperature, but to
avoid the persecution he is exposed to on descending towards the
plain)—attains a much larger size, weighing from thirty to sixty pounds,
and standing two and a half feet high. He is peculiar in his feeding,
and wasteful in his ways—not a large eater, but very partial to warm
fresh blood. “When he falls in with a flock of sheep or goats, he creeps
up to them, writhing like a snake upon his belly, and suddenly springs
upon the back of a victim, bites it in the nape, or through an artery,
and so kills it instantly. After lapping the blood, he tears open the
animal’s belly, eats the entrails and a little from the head, neck, and
shoulders, and leaves the rest. It is not proved that he hides the
remains of his repast; at least such is not the case in our Alps. His
peculiar manner of tearing his prey leaves the shepherds no doubt as to
whether or not it is a lynx that has diminished their flock. He not
unfrequently kills three or four sheep or goats at one onslaught, and
when very hungry will attack calves and cows. In the summer of 1814,
three or four lynxes killed more than 160 sheep and goats in the
mountains of the Simmenthal.” If, however, the lynx can get enough game,
he keeps to it, and seems averse to betray his presence by preying on
tame animals. The chamois is his favourite meat, but difficult to catch,
even when he lies in ambush for them at their salt licks and places of
passage. So he puts up with badgers and marmots, hares, heathcocks, and
other large birds, and, when driven to straits, condescends even to
squirrels and mice. In the winter, when he is obliged to venture down
amongst the hills and into the valleys, his plan is to burrow a way
underground into the stables where the flocks are kept; and Dr Tschudi
relates that upon one occasion a sturdy he-goat, noting the arrival of
the subterranean foe, dealt him, just as he got his head out of the
ground, such severe blows that the robber lay dead in his mine.
Owing to the scarcity of the animal, there is no regular lynx-hunting in
Switzerland, and before a lynx’s presence is discovered by his ravages,
he is usually far enough away, and, if pursued, quits the neighbourhood
altogether. If a hunter comes upon him by accident, he does not run
away, but lies quietly on his branch, gazing fixedly at the man, and is
easily shot. “If the hunter be unarmed, he has only to stick up part of
his clothes, and to leave them there whilst he goes home to fetch his
gun. The lynx continues to stare at the clothes until his return.” Like
the wild-cat, if the lynx is only wounded, he springs upon the hunter,
and bites savagely. Sometimes, however, his attack is made upon the dog,
and the man gets time for a second shot. This fierce beast is more than
a match for two or three ordinary hounds. In various Swiss cantons, high
rewards are paid by the authorities for a lynx’s head: in Friburg, 125
Swiss francs; in Glarus, 15 florins; in Tessin, a louis-d’or.
In Switzerland, as in all countries where forest and mountain abound,
where living is cheap, and where any man may acquire, by a payment so
trifling as to be almost nominal, the right to carry rifle or
fowling-piece, the usual consequences ensue. The game becomes scarcer
every year, and the labouring classes are tempted to idleness and evil
courses. It is lighter work and pleasanter pastime to brush the morning
gossamer from the grass with gun on shoulder and game-bag on hip, than
to drive cattle to pasture, or urge the plough along the stubborn
furrow. So thinks many a stout Switzer, and quits the paths of honest
industry for the hunter’s precarious and unprofitable trade. In the
chapter he devotes to squirrels and mountain hares, Dr Tschudi digresses
to lecture his countrymen on this score. “When the hopeful young
woodman,” he says, “has achieved his first heroic deed, and, by the aid
of a quarter of a pound of small-shot, has picked off, at five paces
distance, a brace of sparrows from the heavy-laden cherry-tree, he
cleans his gun with unusual care, lays aside, half-exultingly and
half-contemptuously, the fragments of his small victims, and muses on
better booty. He has visions of a stray lynx or a fat chamois falling
before his unerring barrels, and makes preparations to start for the
mountains early upon the next Sunday morning, confident of bringing home
at least a hare or a squirrel. Often, when in the valley the clear
church-bells resound from village to village, and the Sabbath morn,
fresh with dew and bright with blossoms, extends its hallowed
peacefulness over the hearts of men weary of working days, a rolling
file-fire is heard in the woods, directed at the tapping woodpecker, the
melodious thrush, the gracefully sportive squirrel—a heathenish _battue_
against His cheerful creatures, which can hardly be very pleasing to God
Almighty. It is a real pity and a shame for the long-legged fools, who
know not how better to employ the Lord’s Day than in this bloody sport,
in which is displayed neither bravery nor woodcraft, but mere idleness
and cruelty.” After which very proper animadversion upon the wanton
bloodthirstiness of his younger countrymen, the worthy doctor makes us
acquainted with sundry curious facts in natural history and
peculiarities of Swiss sport; telling us that squirrels are great lovers
of truffles, hunt for them by scent, dig them up and devour them—a proof
of refined taste, which will cause us to look henceforward with much
increased respect upon that harmless and rotatory quadruped—the ape, as
Dr Tschudi calls it, of European woods. Two pages farther on, we find
described a most barbarous mode of extracting that poor old grey hermit,
the badger, from the depths of his earth. In the canton of Glarus
badgers are drawn like corks—with a screw. A long pole, having a sort of
double corkscrew affixed to its extremity, is thrust into the den, whose
unfortunate tenant is dragged slowly out and knocked on the head, for
the sake of hide, hair, fat, and flesh, all of which are made profitable
in Switzerland; the meat being excellent pork. Fox flesh, as we learn
with some surprise—in the course of a most amusing chapter devoted to
the tricks and stratagems of the Alpine foxes, whose wits are evidently
sharpened by the keenness of the atmosphere—is very good food, if
sufficiently washed and properly prepared. Then we come to the otter.
Who does not remember Isaac Walton’s brief but animated description of
an otter-hunt, in the stream at the bottom of “that meadow, chequered
with water-lilies and lady-smocks,” and his “pleasant question” to the
huntsman, whether he hunts a beast or a fish?—a question resolved by Dr
Tschudi, so far as the custom of the Swiss Catholic cantons may be said
to settle it, for there it is eaten in fast-time as fish. “I am glad
these otters were killed,” said Walton, and, as a lover of the angle,
well he might be, for Dr Tschudi positively affirms that, in the shallow
mountain-streams, a single otter kills many dozen trouts in a night. But
it is time to turn from animals whose habits we have opportunities of
observing in our own country, to one peculiar to the land to which the
volume before us refers.