Identifier: wildspainrecords00chaprich (find matches)
Title: Wild Spain ... records of sport with rifle, rod, and gun, natural history and exploration
Year: 1893 (1890s)
Authors: Chapman, Abel, 1851-1929 Buck, Walter John
Subjects: Hunting -- Spain Game and game-birds -- Spain
Publisher: London, Gurney and Jackson
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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r home in the environs of Almanzor andthe lonely alpine lakes of Gredos. Our personal experiences of the Spanish ibex are limitedto four points—two in the southern sierras, and two on thecentral cordillera : in three of which the habits of the goatsexhibited some very remarkable variations. These, how-ever, we describe more particularly when treating of ibex-shooting in other chapters. The ibex is strictly nocturnal in its habits, passing theday at rest, either on the snow-fields or amidst the mostrugged and inaccessible ground within its reach, and onlydescending to lower levels to feed after sun-down. This * In the Pyrenees, Sir Victor Brooke %viites ns, they are rare,and live in the worst precipices I ever saw an animal in. They go intofar worse ground than chamois, and are very noctiurnal—never seenexcept in the dusk and early dawn, miless disturbed. THE SPANISH IBEX. 133 habit never varies. In the more elevated Cordilleras,where, even in summer, there remain great expanses of
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^^PANISH IBEX, OLD RAM—SIERRA NEVADA. (Front view.) snow and glacier-ice, the wild goats retire at dawn to theheights, spending the day on some bare rock or among thecrevices of crags islanded in the snow-field, and always 184 WILD SPAIN. guarded from danger of surprise by sentries, who holdwatch and ward from some commanding point. Here,except sometimes during the hottest days of July andAugust, they are all but inaccessible—it is impossible to turn their flank, for they have, behind them, vastbreadths of snow impassable to man : while the vigilanceof their sentries simply mocks the stalker—even if theirl^osition is not physically inexpugnable. The only sys-tematic method employed by native hunters, at such times,is the unsatisfactory one of waiting, at dusk, to cut themout in the passes by which they are accustomed to descendto their feeding-grounds—a bitterly cold and most uncer-tain undertaking, to say nothing of its danger, for aftersun-down the soft snow freezes into a s

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