HONEY BUZZARD. 87 



ficial examination of the feet and legs would warrant us in 

 ascribing to it. A few hours afterwards, the task was found 

 to be entirely completed, the comb torn out and cleared from 

 the immature young ; and after dissection proved that at this 

 season (autumn), at least, birds or mammalia formed no part 

 of the food. A steel trap, baited with the comb, secured 

 the aggressor in the course of the next day, when he had 

 returned to review the scene of his previous havoc." 



The stomach of a specimen killed in the north of Ireland, 

 and examined by Mr. Thompson of Belfast, " contained a 

 few of the larvse and some fragments of perfect coleopterous 

 insects ; several whitish coloured hairy caterpillars ; the pupse 

 of a species of butterfly, and also of the six-spot burnet 

 moth." The stomach of one examined by White of Sel- 

 borne contained some limbs of frogs, and many grey snails 

 without shells. 



Examinations have usually proved the food to have been 

 the larvse of bees and wasps, to obtain which the receptacles 

 containing them are scratched out and broken up in the 

 manner described by Sir William Jardine. In one instance, 

 in the case of a Honey Buzzard kept in confinement, I was 

 told that it killed and ate rats, as well as birds of consider- 

 able size, with great ease and good appetite. BufFon says, 

 that in winter, when fat, the Honey Buzzard is good eating. 



This species builds or takes to a nest on a high tree in a 

 wood or forest. White, in his Natural History of Selborne, 

 says, that " a pair of Honey Buzzards built them a large 

 shallow nest, composed of twigs, and lined with dead beechen 

 leaves, upon a tall slender beech near the middle of Selborne 

 Hanger, in the summer of 1780. In the middle of the 

 month of June, a bold boy climbed this tree, though stand- 

 ing on so steep and dizzy a situation, and brought down an 

 egg, the only one in the nest, which had been sat on for 

 some time and contained the embryo of a young bird. The 



