Page:Bird-lore Vol 01.djvu/275

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
How a Marsh Hawk Grows
47


they are hatched one day apart — nest-finding is easy. On one occasion I saw a male Marsh Hawk flying heavily westward, a quarter of a mile away, carrying what afterward proved to be leopard sper- mophile. Steadily I watched him until he had passed the open fields and meadows and reached an open space between two poplar and willow 'bluffs.' He was then more than half a mile awa}'. Sud- denly, from the ground below him. rose his mate, with most exquisite grace, catching, with her feet upward, the prey that he dropped to her when she was a. few feet below him. With slight detour, she went at once to the nest ; to which I also went, well-nigh as directly, locating the nest before I reached it, in the little cluster of willows just beneath the bird. One brood of birds reared in such a site as this, on a vacant section of land amid the fields, I believe to have been reared by the female alone. In forty days of occasional study I never saw or heard the male. This nest, found when the first egg was hatching, has formed the basis of all subsequent study as to ages, and relative feather-growth : so that the most of what follows will group the facts portrayed about this family, though other broods have supplied their quota of interesting things. I have never detected any difference in the foods brought to the young at the various stages of their growth. Smaller morsels for the smaller birds, and that seems all. Among the ejecta analyzed have been found the remains of field-mice, leopard frogs, leopard and striped spermophiles ; and, I am compelled to confess it, young Pinnated Grouse. Of these, three skeletons have been found. In the main, the male is the hunter. This habit of dropping the quarry to the nest, or to the mate, is rather common — I having, while half concealed in my buggy by dense brush, seen the male approach an open area beyond, hardly two hundred feet away, and drop the game to his mate from a height of fifty feet above her, she then carrying it a hundred yards awa}', to the nest — the only nest I ever failed to find. In two weeks after birth the birds grow lanky. About this time they begin to make run-ways from the nest, to eat their food in seclusion, or to find a better shade from the heat of a June sun. At about three weeks the flight-feathers begin to sprout, and the lusty young things, prone enough to hide along their run-ways at two weeks old, become now more bold, yet no less inclined to slink away the minute one's back is turned. After this age the photographing of these birds becomes a science by itself — requiring cool, sunny days, abundant patience, and no end of plates. The mosquitoes and the blue-bottle flies, both being faithful retainers at the Marsh Hawk's