BIRDS OF PREY OF NOVA SCOTIA—GILPIN. 263 
Fundy tide has filled up to the very rushes the salt water 
estuaries and creeks; when the peeps and shore birds are like 
snowy drifts on the edge of the tide, waiting for the ebb; when 
the herons, coming full twenty miles from their heronry by the 
forest lake side, are roosting in awkward groups on the spruce 
pines and birches overhanging the tideway, also waiting for the 
ebb; then an instant alarm of shrieks from the herons, follow- 
ed by an instant barking of the crows, rising and falling about 
the tops of the pines, disturb you, as floating In your canoe you 
are watching how a feathery cull, or an early scoter, is breaking 
the majestic mirror all around you, Malti Pictou, your Indian, 
says, “May bee herons don’t like the hawk”; and then, as you 
turn your eyes landward, you see the hawk sailing in short cir- 
cles around and then with a sweep fetching down upon the 
herons, recovering himself and passing with lazily flap of wing 
slowly their roosting trees. He, too, is waiting for the ebb. 
The sparrow hawk (F. sparverius) is not rare with us; my notes 
of him are in Sept., but Mr. J. M. Jones allows me to say, he has 
seen them during the summer in the valley of Annapolis, with 
all the habits of a resident bird, and probably nesting. Its 
beautiful colouring and bold upright form and audacity makes 
him everywhere a marked species. Of the next family of buz- 
zards, I have identified three species. This family, more robust 
than the last and more powerful in form, have less audacity, 
sitting for hours listlessly on a dead tree, living on the smaller 
mammals and reptiles, which flying low they snatch rather than 
pounce upon, are still audacious plunderers of the farm yard. 
Of the red shouldered hawk (B. lineatus) I have only Mr. 
Downs’ notes. I have never seen it. The winter falcon (A 
lagobus) is seen rarely here. A specimen in the Halifax Museum 
agrees with Richardson’s figure and description, the colours 
scarcely so bright. I saw one specimen of a black hawk in Mr. 
Roue’s collection, at Halifax, 1870. It was alive and therefore 
could not be examined closely, but it looked so very unlike in 
size and figure the lagobus that I could scarcely call it a 
nigritism of that bird. But still I have nothing explicit enough 
to call it a true species, especially as the best writers unite in 
