266 BIRDS OF PREY OF NOVA SCOTIA—-GILPIN. 
been torn from your foot. The bold grandeur of its massive 
head, supported by a neck arched like a horse and adorned 
by shining and golden hackles, imposed itself upon you 
as the type of force and pride; and yet he was trapped. He 
was seeking dead meat, which he devours as well as carrion. 
In beauty and severity of expression he far surpasses the bald 
head (F. leucocephalus), the only other eagle we have. Though 
he will eat carrion, and gorge himself over the carcase of a dead 
horse: though he will enter your gardens, and strike a pea fowl 
or Brahma pullet: yet he adds dead and stranded fish to his 
larder. Hence his abundance, and his fatness. He remains all 
year with us, especially about the shores of the Bay of Fundy, 
building his nest sometimes in trees, at other times on scraggy 
rocks. As usual, the perfect adults with milk-white tail and 
head are few in comparison with the brown and splotched white 
young, and what is singular those young are larger in their 
dimensions than the adults. I have known them six inches 
longer than old male adults. An immature bird shot near 
Halifax, in January, 1855, measured nearly eighteen feet wing 
spread, with tail of sixteen inches. He was shot rising from the 
carcase of a dead horse upon which he had gorged himself. 
These dimensions exceed the dimensions of the Washington 
eagle. In studying many specimens, both adults and young, as 
regards seutillation of tarsus, I found them to vary so much, not 
only among individuals but in the individual itself, in number, 
as to be of no use as a typical mark. Audubon makes it a ditfer- 
ential mark in the Washington eagle. An eagle about two weeks 
old, now in Halifax Museum, has twelve on tarsus and twenty 
on middle toe. The legs of an adult, shot at Digby, 1880, and 
mounted as candlesticks, has none upon tarsus. One must con- 
clude that they are shed and renewed. In all my examinations 
of grey or splotched white and brown specimens, I have never 
seen any but what were the young of the bald. In the list of 
rapacious birds I have presented to the Institute as inhabiting 
Nova Scotia, identified by myself or friends, we find that with 
the exception of the screech owl (8. asio), we have all the New 
England species of owls as visitants or residents, and this as a 
