50 
The Birds of Pembrokeshire. 
observed as a frequent visitor to the county. Sir Hugh Owen 
has informed us that in the winter of 1851 an Eagle was seen 
almost daily in the neighbourhood of Haverfordwest, more par- 
ticularly frequenting the covers of Picton Castle and Slebech, 
and that it escaped being shot. This bird was supposed to have 
been a Golden Eagle, but with more probability may be con- 
sidered to have been an immature White-tailed Eagle, a species 
not unseldom observed as a straggler along the western coasts of 
the kingdom. Then, another Eagle, of whose occurrence we do 
not possess the date, that was seen on Skomer, and was thought 
to have been a Spotted Eagle, and was not obtained, was more 
likely a young White-tailed Eagle on passage. In Lord 
Cawdor’s collection, at Stackpole Court, we have seen a young 
White-tailed Eagle that had been shot near Carmarthen, and 
with this bird we exhaust our meagre record of the Eagles 
seen or obtained in the south-west corner of the Principality. 
SPARROW -HAWK, Accipiter nisus.— A common resident ; 
numerous in the wilder unpreserved parts of the county. This 
dangerous and recklessly courageous bird was very plentiful at 
Stone Hall, where we suffered much from his attacks upon the 
game. Scores of times we used to see a male Sparrow-hawk 
fluttering against our windows endeavouring to reach our cage 
birds inside, or watching them from the porch; and in the 
summer, when some of the cages would be brought out of 
doors, we repeatedly had to mourn over the death of some of 
our pets that had been killed by the marauder striking 
them through the wires. The Snipe that dropped into the 
marshy meadow below our house were regularly worked by 
Sparrow-hawks, anda stile in one of the covers was the favourite 
place to which they were carried and eaten, so that the ground 
beneath was littered with Snipe feathers. For some time we 
attributed this destruction to Merlins, until one day we came 
upon a male Sparrow-hawk with a freshly-killed Snipe in his 
feet, which we picked up as the bird flew off. Any bunch of 
Teai that appeared upon the river used to be persecuted by 
