OSPREY. a7 
have the effect, in a few years, of destroying the tree in which 
it has been placed. The male partially assists the female in 
the business of incubation, and at other times keeps near her, 
and provides her with food—she sits accordingly very close. 
Both birds, when the young are hatched, share the task of 
feeding them with fish, and have even been seen to supply 
them when they have left the nest and have been on the 
wing themselves; they both also courageously defend them 
against all aggressors, both human and others. They only rear 
one brood in the year. If one of the parents happen to be 
killed, the other is almost sure to return, ere long, with a 
fresh mate: where procured, as in other similar cases, is indeed 
a mystery. 
The nest of the Osprey is an immense pile of twigs, small 
and large sticks and branches, some of them an inch and a 
half in diameter—the whole forming sometimes a mass easily 
discernible at the distance of half a mile or more, and in 
quantity enough to fill a cart. How it is that it is not blown 
down, or blown to pieces by a gale of wind, is a question 
which has yet to be explained. It occasionally is heaped up 
to the height of four or five feet, or even eight, and is from 
two to three feet in breadth, interlaced and compacted with 
sea-weed, stalks of corn, grass, or turf; the whole, in conse- 
quence of annual repairs and additions, which even in human 
dwellings often make a house so much larger than it was 
originally intended to be, not to say unsightly, becoming by 
degrees of the character described above. It is built either on 
a tree, at a height of from six, seven, or eight to fifteen feet, 
and from that to fifty feet from the ground; on a forsaken 
building, or the ruins of some ancient fortress, erected on the 
edge of a Highland Loch, the chimney, if the remains of one 
are in existence, being generally preferred, or on the summit 
of some insular crag; in fact, it accomodates itself easily to 
any suitable and favourable situation. Bewick, erroneously 
following Willughby, (and Mudie him,) says that the Osprey 
builds its nest ‘on the ground among reeds’—it very rarely 
indeed does so. It is a curious fact that smaller birds frequently 
build their nests in the outside of those of the Osprey, without 
molestation on the one hand, or fear on the other. Larger 
birds also build theirs in the immediate vicinity, without any 
disturbance on the part of either. 
The eggs, which are sometimes only two in number, but 
occasionally three, and in some instances, but very rarely, as 
