132 BRITISH BIRDS. 
field to a reed-bed. It seeks its food in true Harrier style, quartering the 
ground regularly, beating up and down the fields in search of grasshoppers, 
lizards, mice, and other small prey. Now and then it secures a small bird 
which it has surprised before it had time to take wing, and occasionally it 
pays a visit to some neighbourmg marsh to pick up a frog or small 
mammal, Its long and pointed wings give an especial gracefulness to its 
flight; now it darts rapidly with half-closed wings, now it makes a sudden 
turn with one wing elevated, and now it sails over the surface of the 
ground with motionless outspread wings ; but with all its apparent power 
of flight it seldom if ever pursues small birds if they attempt to escape. 
Montagu’s Harrier has also the habit of sailing in wide circles, like many 
other birds of prey. Mr. Howard Saunders describes the female, which 
he put off a nest in the Isle of Wight, as flying away in repeated and 
gradually widening circles. The same feature was remarked on the return 
to the nest: the wide circles gradually narrowed; and the wings were 
suddenly closed as she swept over the nest and dropped upon it. 
In Germany Montaguw’s Harrier is a somewhat late breeder. The 
only time I have taken the nest was on the 23rd of last May. The 
eggs were quite fresh. The nest is very difficult to find. Saunders’s 
nest above referred to was in a small clearing not two yards across, 
amongst the gorse on the open heath, and was a mere hollow in the 
ground lined with dry grass, with an outside border of heather twigs. The 
nest I took was a few miles out of Halberstadt, in the middle of the great 
prairie lying north of the Hartz Mountains. We were a party of four—our 
host Oberamtmann Ferdinand Heine, Dr. Blasius of Brunswick, my son, 
and myself. We were all in very high spirits, “coming thro’ the rye” 
with three Great Bustard’s eggs which we had just taken. Suddenly we 
observed a pair of Montagu’s Harriers flyimg over the corn, crying and 
toying with each other almost lke Terns. In this district of enormous 
farms and high farming, the ground is very fertile, and the rye stood more 
than five feet high in a field which could not be much less than a hundred 
acres in extent. It seemed like looking for a needle in a haystack ; but 
our host and guide told us that several pairs of Harriers bred annually on 
his farm ; so we walked down each side of the rye, one of us following a 
narrow path up the centre. We saw at different times five or six birds, 
one pair especially seeming to show some anxiety at our presence. Finally 
one of the birds dropped somewhat suddenly into the waving corn 
Dr. Blasius undertook to stalk her up, but, when she rose, missed her with 
both barrels. We were, however, delighted to find that she had risen from 
her nest containing four fresh eggs. ‘There was no hole whatever in the 
ground ; the rye had only been trampled down, and a slight but somewhat 
neat nest made of corn-stalks lined with a little dry straw. The nest was 
rather more than nine inches in diameter and about two inches and a half 
