BROWN BEE-HAWK. 261 



dition, especially in autumn and winter. Indeed, owing to the 

 great quantity of oily fat under the skin, it is difficult to pre- 

 pare specimens of it. Its flight is said to be low and not usually 

 extended, and this may be the case when it has assumed a sta- 

 tion in a favourable locality ; but from the length and form of 

 its wings and tail, it must have a mode of flight very similar 

 to that of the Kite. With us it is apparently a summer visi- 

 tant, and not a permanent resident, for all the specimens whose 

 dates of capture or death are recorded, have been obtained in 

 summer and autumn. 



A few instances of its breeding in England are known. 

 White, in his celebrated Natural History of Selborne, says, 

 " A pair of Honey Buzzards built them a large shallow nest, 

 composed of twigs, and lined with dead beechen leaves, upon 

 a tall slender beech, near the middle of Selborne Hanger, in 

 the summer of 1780, In the middle of the month of June, a 

 bold boy climbed this tree, though standing on so steep and 

 dizzy a situation, and brought down an egg, the only one in 

 the nest, wdiich had been sat on for some time, and contained 

 the embryo of a young bird. The egg was smaller, and not so 

 round as those of the common buzzard, was dotted at each end 

 with small red spots, and surrounded in the middle with a 

 broad bloody zone." Mr J. ISI. Brown informs me that he 

 " once found a nest of the Honey Buzzard in the woods of 

 Abergeldie in Aberdeenshire. It was built in a tree, and re- 

 sembled that of the Common Buzzard. There were three eggs, 

 of a whitish colour spotted with light and dark brown. The 

 male was shot, before it was known what species had been met 

 with." M. Temminck says its eggs are " marked with large 

 reddish-brown patches, and are often entirely of that colour, or 

 with numerous spots so close together that the white is scarce- 

 ly perceptible." An egg from France, in the museum of tho 

 University of Edinburgh, is of a broadly elliptical form, two 

 inches and half a twelfth in length, one inch and six and a half 

 twelfths in breadth, white, with blotches of greenish-brown, 

 which have probably been at first reddish-brown. Mr Yar- 

 rell, in his History of British Birds, mentions his having seen 

 three or four specimens, one of which resembled that described 



