water till he spies a fish near the surface; then 
he dives for it with the speed of a flying arrow. 
He is strong of wing and seldom misses his mark. 
A young bird with a broken leg, cared for at one 
of the cottages, measured three and a half feet 
from tip to tip of wing. He is very sociable and 
fond of his home, which is seldom far away from 
the sea. Along the road to Red Bank, just west 
of Monmouth Beach, stands an old storm-torn 
sycamore in the dead top of which is the nest of 
a fish hawk. It is a rough looking affair, two 
or more feet in diameter, built of coarse branches 
and rubbish from the shore. 
Of the three birds mentioned, the sea gull is 
by far the most attractive and beautiful. His 
ease and grace of motion on the wing, which is 
most of the time, is surpassed by the barn 
swallow only. 
Birds Hobnob Together. 
As I wrote you in a former letter, the variety 
of birds here has not been great, but robins, 
meadow larks, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, 
songspariows and chippies have been numerous 
and social. The robins, songsparrows and chip- 
pies have crowded their little homes as close to 
the cottages as tree, shrub and vine would admit. 
There were four robins’ nests, two songsparrows’ 
and a chippy’s within a square of a hundred 
feet between two of the cottages. From the 
piazza we can look into three of the robins’ nests, 
one of which is so near we can watch the parent 
28 
