Notícia de la fauna de Catalunya i d'Andorra al final del segle XVIII

Resum

The present work on historical zoology presents a series of data, mainly about the great mammals and certain birds, coming from an exhaustive enquiry carried out two hundred years ago by the royal functionary Francisco de Zamora. Even though among the originals of the enquiries conserved in the Library of the Palacio Real in Madrid there is no reference to some Catalan regions, data about the Western Pyrenees, so important from a faunistic point of view, are fortunately available. Apart from the referred documents, other documentary sources from the same period have been used.
Among the great fauna, it is to be remarked the extreme abundance of the wolf (Canis lupus), present throughout the territory; the presence of the brown bear (Ursus arctos) all around the Pyrenean area; single references to the lynx, covering a wide area, not being able to determine the species they belonged to; the wild boar (Sus scrofa); the red deer (Cervus elaphus) in the Pyrenees and in the Ebro mountains (south of the territory); the fallow deer (Dama dama) in scattered locations; the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) limited to the Pyrenean Valley of Aran; some other Pyrenean references of the wild goat (Capra pyrenaica), and also a lot of references to the chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) in the same mountains.
Most of the referred species got extinguished and, apart from recent reintroductions of some kinds of deers, only the wild 'boar and the chamois, which are pretty abundant, have remained in wild state; the wild goat has also been conserved in a reserve in the southern mountains, having been exterminated from the Pyrenees. There are references to the occasional presence of specimens of brown bear and the existence of some lynx is guessed.
Besides the common mammals, as the fox, the rabbit, the hare, etc., which we do not refer to, we mentions the stoat, the otter, the beech and pine marten, the wild cat, the genet, etc.
Among the birds, the abundant references to the capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) in the Pyrenean forests are to be pointed out; the partridge (Perdix perdix), limited here to the mountain fields; the ptarmigan (Lagopus mutus) in the high mountains. It is specially remarkable the reference to the breeding of the dotterel (Eudromias morinellus) in the eastern Pyrenees, in the same area where a relic population of this species was found in the 50's of this century.
Among the birds, we also find references to birds of prey and to ducks, geese and swans, not always possible to identify.