258 Sketches of Some Common Birds. 



as is frequently the case, the usual mode of capture is that 

 one of the hawks will drive the squirrel around the tree 

 while the other bird poises to seize it as it dodges around 

 to avoid the first hawk." 



This hawk breeds earlier than any other. Mdification 

 begins some time after the middle of February, generally 

 about the first of March. The eggs are usually deposited 

 in the latter half of March in this section. In New Eng- 

 land the time of nesting is somewhat later. Its nest is 

 commonly placed in one of the highest trees in the locality 

 it frequents, and the refurnishing of an old structure of 

 former years is preferable to the labor of building a new 

 home. When no old nest is at hand in a suitable site, it 

 makes a nest of coarse twigs and sticks, mingling with 

 these materials dried grass, leaves, moss, corn-husks, and 

 a few feathers. The cavity is generally less than two 

 inches deep and ten or eleven inches across, though the 

 nest is quite bulky, and if reoccupied for successive 

 seasons, it generally becomes somewhat enlarged each 

 year by the addition of similar materials. One season I 

 found a nest that was lined with cottonwood bark, and 

 the next year the same nest was extensively refurnished 

 with corn -husks. Few birds nest higher in trees than the 

 red-tailed hawk. Eobert Eidgway, in "Natural History 

 Survey of Illinois," tells of a nest ninety feet from the 

 ground in a black gum tree in southern Illinois. A set 

 of two eggs was taken on March 21, 1895, from a nest 

 eighty-five feet from the ground in a huge shelj-bark 

 hickory. The same season a set of two eggs was found 

 in a nest eighty-six feet from the ground in a giant syca- 

 more, and the next year a set of three eggs was taken 

 from the same nest. In the Oologist for November, 1892, 

 Mr. J. Warren Jacobs describes a nest in a shell-bark 

 hickory ninety feet above the ground, and in the same 

 journal of July, 1892, Mr. Albert Garrett says that he has 

 found the nest at various heights ranging between thirty- 

 nine and eighty-six feet, all actually measured. Other 

 observers attest to the high location of the nests of this 

 species, and to the almost inaccessible sites ordinarily 

 chosen. 



The eggs are usually two in number, but three are fre- 



