4 Massachusetts Audubon Society 



BOSTON'S DUCK HAWK. 



Among the wild birds of Boston must now be nimibered the duck 

 hawk. According to excellent authority, this bird was seen about the Cus- 

 tom House tower a year ago last fall, making its home on, or at least fre- 

 quenting, a convenient ledge just beneath the clock. Later it changed to a 

 nook above the clock, which it has occupied ever since. It has been seen 

 to strike pigeons within fifteen feet of a window in the tower and to go 

 down to the harbor and return with a black duck. Boston has for some 

 years been noted for its barred owl which inhabited the Granary Burying- 

 Ground and must have made the skull and cross-bones insignia a very 

 real thing to countless sparrows and pigeons. The nighthawks nest on the 

 Back Bay housetops and hawk over the city. Crows often come in and 

 raid the roof of the Rogers Building and probably other roofs in the city, 

 taking toll of young birds and eggs in the sparrows' and pigeons' nests. 

 These are just raids, but the duck hawk seems to have adopted the city as 

 its home. Duck hawks usually nest on high cliffs and no doubt this bird 

 feels perfectly at home on the high tower while the city traffic goes on so 

 far belbw as to be in no wise disturbing. 



Most of our night herons go well south for the winter, spending the 

 frigid months from the Gulf of Mexico southward. A few of them do not 

 go so far, and the records refer to them as being "casual in winter" to 

 Massachusetts. Last winter a pair of them stayed at Westhaven, Connecti- 

 cut, going down the bay to the flats for food but, with excellent wisdom, 

 returning to roost to the yard of Mr, Herbert K. Job, of the National As- 

 sociation's Department of Applied Ornithology. Mr. Job has in his yard 

 some tall Norway spruces, and there the birds would sit, facing the bitter 

 wind when the thermometer registered zero or lower. The spot is in a 

 rather thickly populated portion of Westhaven which has recently talked 

 of applying for a city charter. Birds have sometimes a seemingly un- 

 canny knowledge as to their friends and enemies. No man in all Con- 

 necticut would be surer to appreciate the presence of these birds and to 

 protect them, but how could the birds know that? Anyway, they roosted 

 in his trees. ^ . , 



It may be that night herons are becoming more numerous and more 

 friendly. Their rookeries, now rather rare inland though found in many 

 places along the coast, used to be in almost every cedar swamp, exceedingly 

 interesting if not altogether, attractive places when the tide of young life 

 there was at its height. Indiscriminate nest-robbing and shooting broke 

 these up, and the birds have been slow to come back to the old abiding- 

 spots. Yet the report comes that eight of these have for a considerable 

 time this spring frequented the little chain of ponds in Franklin Park near 

 Morton St. Many people saw them there, and the officer on the beat took 



