48 BULLETIN 17 0, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



orama of fields, gardens, orchards, and woodlands, dotted with farm 

 houses and intersected by the winding, silvery thread of the river. 

 The ledge, on which the aerie was located, was about 14 feet long, 6 

 feet wide at its widest part, and only 20 inches wide at the nest. 

 Some grass and moss were growing on it, a gray birch sapling grew 

 near the center, and a few very small birch saplings fringed the nar- 

 row end in front of the nest. The four handsome eggs lay in a slight 

 hollow, an inch and a half deep and about 12 inches wide, scraped in 

 the accumulated soil and rubbish, and surrounded by flakes of rock, 

 a few twigs, scattering bird bones, several pellets, and an aluminum 

 band from the leg of a carrier pigeon. The nest is well illustrated in 

 the photograph (pi. 11) taken by my other companion, Frank C. 

 Willard, who climbed up to the nest from below, while I handled the 

 ropes on the top of the cliff. 



On that same trip, in the same general region, we visited four 

 other nesting sites, at all of which the birds were in evidence and 

 solicitous; at one place we failed to locate the nest, and at the others 

 the nests were empty, evidently robbed. On Sugarloaf Mountain 

 the empty scrape was on a small shelf, less than 10 feet from the top 

 of the high cliff and easily accessible. The aerie on Mount Tekoa 

 was also easily reached, as it was about halfway up on a low irregular 

 cliff not over 50 feet high; the ledge was partly overgrown with grass, 

 and the nest was merely a hollow lined with grass. 



I had found a duck hawk's nest with eggs twice previously on 

 Bear Mountain in this same range. This is a steeply sloping moun- 

 tain of about 1,000 feet altitude, more or less wooded on the slopes 

 and capped by an almost perpendicular cliff of trap rock about 100 

 feet high. The nest had been located the previous year by my com- 

 panion, R. P. Stapleton, on a fairly accessible ledge on a steeply 

 sloping part of the cliff ; but this year, 1907, the falcons had chosen 

 for their aerie a small ledge, about 6 feet long and 18 inches wide, on 

 the perpendicular part of the cliff, about 70 feet down from the top 

 and 30 feet up from the base, protected from above by overhanging 

 rock and difficult to reach from the only accessible side, as the rock 

 bulged out so far that there was no foothold within 10 feet of the 

 aerie. On May 18, 1907, the nest contained three half incubated 

 eggs, laid in a hollow in the soil about 3 feet from a small gray birch. 

 The following year, on May 16, these falcons had three heavily 

 incubated eggs in the same spot. 



The duck hawk breeds at various places in the Appalachian Moun- 

 tain Chain, at least as far south as Tennessee. Albert F. Ganier 

 (1931) found a nest on a picturesque, lofty crag on the slope of Mount 

 LeConte, in the Great Smoky Mountains, on April 7, 1929; the site, 

 which had probably been in use for years, was quite similar to those 



