60 RED-TAILED HAWK. 



since the decline of falconry, seldom or never domesticated, oflFer to 

 those who wish eagerly to investigate their history, and to delineate 

 their particular character and manners, great and insurmountable difE- 

 culties. Little more can be done in such cases than to identify the 

 species, and trace it through the various quarters of the world, where 

 it has been certainly met with. 



The Red-tailed Hawk is most frequently seen in the lower parts of 

 Pennsylvania, during the severity of winter. Among the extensive 

 meadows that border the Schuylkill and Delaware, below Philadelphia, 

 where flocks of Larks [Alauda magna), and where mice and moles are 

 in great abundance, many individuals of this Hawk spend the greater 

 part of the winter. Others prowl around the plantations, looking out 

 for vagrant chickens ; their method of seizing which, is by sweeping 

 swiftly over the spot, and grappliiig them with their talons, bearing 

 them away to the woods. The bird from which the figure in the plate 

 was drawn, was surprised in the act of feeding on a hen he had just 

 killed,- and which he was compelled to abandon. The remains of the 

 chicken were immediately baited to a steel-trap, and early the next 

 morning the unfortunate' Red-tail was found a prisoner, securely fastened 

 by the leg. The same hen which the day before he had massacred, was, 

 the very next, made the means of decoying him to his destruction ; in 

 the eye of the farmer a system of fair and just retribution. 



This species inhabits the whole United States ; and, I believe, is not 

 migratory, as I found it in the month of May, as far south as Fort 

 Adams, in the Mississippi teri-itory. The young were at that time 

 nearly as large as their parents, and were very clamorous, making an 

 incessant squealing noise. One, which I shot, contained in its stomach 

 mingled fragments of frogs and lizards. 



The Red-tailed Hawk is twenty inches long, and three fe^t nine 

 inches in extent ; bill blue black ; cere and sides of the mouth yellow, 

 tinged with green ; lores and spot on the under eyelid white, the former 

 marked with fine radiating hairs ; eyebrow, or cartilage, a dull eel skin 

 color, prominent, projecting over the eye ; a broad streak of dark 

 brown extends from the sides of the mouth backwards ; crown and 

 hind-head dark brown, seamed with white and ferruginous ; sides of the 

 neck dull ferruginous, streaked with brown ; eye large ; iris pale amber ; 

 back and shoulders deep brown ; wings dusky, barred with blackish ; 

 ends of the five first primaries nearly black ; scapulars barred broadly 

 with white and brown ; sides of the tail-coverts white, barred with 

 ferruginous, middle ones dark, edged with rust ; tail rounded, extending 

 two inches beyond the wings, and of a bright red brown, with a single 

 band of black near the end, and tipped with brownish white ; on some of 

 the lateral feathers are slight indications of the remains of other narrow 

 bars ; lower parts brownish white ; the breast ferruginous, streaked 



