How a Marsh Hawk Grows 47 



they are hatched one day apart — nest-finding is easy. On one oc- 

 casion 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 



