THE AMERICAN EAGLE HEKRICK 269 



screams soared over the tree tops; neither bird would come to the 

 nest while I was in the neifrhborhood. At this time there were two 

 eaglets, in full feather but quite invisible from below, except as one 

 would appear and shoot a white stream well over the edge of the 

 nest. At the Vermilion nest we did not hear the alarm call after 

 the last week of May in 1922 ; not once was it sounded within hear- 

 ing during our long vigil beginning early in June and lasting until 

 the flight of the young eagles in early July. Silence also seemed to 

 be the rule during the present season, and it was possible for us to 

 determine the female only by her slightly greater size and more sin- 

 ister countenance. We noticed, however, that whenever an observer 

 showed himself upon our platform, passed under one of the perches, 

 or approached the observatory tree, either eagle, if present, would 

 crane its neck in his direction, open and close the mandibles, and if 

 uttering any sound at all, biting it off so effectually that it was 

 scarcely audible at a distance of 80 feet. 



Two nests which I examined at Danbury, on July 5, 1922, and 

 which were occupied successively by the same pair of birds, were 

 markedly convex at the top, but whether this peculiarity was due to 

 a habit or whim of the builders or, as seemed more likely, to a 

 lack of suitable supports at the margin of the nests, could not be 

 determined. I am able to give a partial history of these nests 

 through the efforts of Mr. W. G. Tibbels to save the eaglets from 

 community vengeance. The farmers in their vicinity, it seems, had 

 lost a number of their chickens and were bent on keeping the eagle 

 population down. The first nest to be built and occupied stood at 

 a height of about 70 feet in the top of a dead shellbark hickory on 

 the edge of woods, about midway between Sanduslr^ Bay and the 

 lake; it was rather more than 6 feet tall and measured 4% feet 

 across the top. Mr. Tibbels climbed to this nest at about the middle 

 of June for three years in succession, 1919-1921, and removed the 

 young, his plan being to hold them until they were able to fly 

 and then release them. The old eagles, he told me, behaved in 

 essentially the same way each time he raided their aerie ; they would 

 swoop down at him with talons extended as if about to strike, but 

 they always swerved when 6 feet or more away and would eventu- 

 ally settle in the top of neighboring trees where, with opening and 

 closing mandibles, they gave vent to their alarms. They did not 

 leave the vicinity while he was at the nest. On one of these visits 

 the aerie was strewn with the carcasses of muskrats, rabbits, chick- 

 ens, and fish, including the half-decomposed body of a large carp: 

 two of the muskrat skeletons carried each a steel trap, which might 

 indicate that these rodents had been taken outside of the nesting 



