[Illustration: GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO (_Oxylophus glandarius_)]
A single class only will here be specifically mentioned, and that because it throws light on climatic conditions. Among these vernal arrivals come certain raptores in countless numbers--all those which are dependent on reptile and insect food. For even in sunny Andalucia the larger reptiles and insects hibernate; hence their persecutors (including various eagles, buzzards, and harriers, with kites and kestrels in thousands) are driven to seek winter-quarters in Africa.
Another phenomenon deserves note. Weeks, nay months, after this great vernal upturn in bird-life has completed its revolution, and when the newcomers have already half finished the duties of incubation, then in May suddenly occurs an utterly belated little migration quite disconnected from all the rest. This is the passage, or rather through-transit, of those far-flying cosmopolites of space that make the whole world their home. They have been wintering in South Africa and Madagascar, in Australia and New Zealand, and are now returning to their summer breeding-grounds in farthest Siberia, beyond the Yenisei. Thus some morning in early May one sees the marismas filled with godwits and knots, curlew-sandpipers and grey plovers, all in their glorious summer-plumage. But these only tarry here a few days. A short week before they had thronged the shores of the southern hemisphere--far beyond the zodiac of Capricorn. A week hence and they are at home in the Arctic.
Andalucia possesses a feathered census that approaches 400 species; but of these hardly a score are permanently resident throughout the year.
Rest twelve hours in Spain on the journey--Australia to Siberia.]
Four-footed creatures are less difficult of diagnosis than are birds. By nature less mobile, they are infinitely less numerous specifically. Relatively the Spanish census is long, and includes, locally, quite a number of interesting beasts that are "lumped together" as _Alimañas_--to wit, lynxes, wild-cats, genets, mongoose, foxes, otters, badgers, of which we treat separately. The two chief game-animals of the Coto Doñana are the red deer and the wild-boar. These two we here examine from the sportsman's point of view as much as from that of the naturalist.