GOLDEN EAGLE AND SEA EAGLE. 37 



the bird which has so frequently been made to 

 usurp his title in the south of England. The fact 

 is, that whenever an immature sea eagle,* in his 

 juvenile dress of shabby brown — ere his cinereous 

 coat and white tail pronounce him to have arrived 

 at years of discretion — has wandered from his 

 native haunts, in the vain hope of getting a living 

 on our shores, and has fallen an easy victim to 

 the watchful shepherd or the wily gamekeeper, a 

 paragraph detailing the occurrence forthwith goes 

 the round of the local papers, and the bird is 

 gravely pronounced to be " a magnificent speci- 

 men of the golden eagle.'' 



Strange as this may seem to those who are 

 now well acquainted, not only with the general 

 characters of the two species, but with their ana- 

 tomical distinctions, yet to the uninitiated the dif- 

 ference does not appear so striking as might be 

 imagined. I remember on one occasion visitino- 

 a museum with a friend — a superficial observer — 

 in whose eyes the young sea eagle seemed to bear 

 a greater affinity to the mature golden than to the 

 adults of its own species ; the dark beak and the 

 prevalent brown colour of the plumage in this 

 bird at once attracting his attention, while the 

 unfeathered tarsi and scutellated toes escaped his 



Hcdiceetus cdbiciUa. 



