MERLIN. 87 
approached; it is only by accident that it is occasionally met 
with within gun-shot. 
The Merlin flies low, and with great ease and celerity. It 
suddenly sweeps by, and is gone almost before you have had 
time to glance at it, gliding along the side of a hedge or 
wood, and then over, or into it, and sometimes affording a 
more lengthened view, by its flight over the open fields, or 
the wide moor, where it may be seen following its prey 
through its devious track,: according to the nature of the 
ground. ‘In pursuit of prey,’ says Sir William Jardine, ‘the 
Merlin does not often mount above it and rush down, as we 
have generally seen the Peregrine, but at once gives chase, 
following the victim through all its turns and windings to 
escape, and unless cover is at hand, is generally successful.’ 
Its principal food consists of birds; and it attacks and slays 
those which are even double its own size, such as partridges, 
and also quails, plovers, and pigeons, as well as larks, linnets, 
starlings, sandpipers, snipes, chaffinches, blackbirds, swallows, 
thrushes, goldfinches, and others which are smaller; as also 
cockchaffers and other insects. In pursuit of shore birds, 
dunlins, ring dotterels, and others, it will course them to the 
edge of, and sometimes even over the water. It is so deter- 
mined on and in the capture of its prey, that it is difficult 
to make it leave that which it has secured, and which it 
often obtains by pouncing on it unawares, but it also chases 
it in the open air. The lesser birds it captures from the 
‘ ground, but those which are too large to be thus borne off, 
it can only surprise when on the wing. It frequently perches 
on a stone or crag, flitting from one to another, as if for 
the purpose of surveying all around it, and when a flock 
of small birds comes within its ken, it singles out one from 
the rest, and is not attracted from it to any of the others. 
The nest is generally, in this country at least, built on the 
ground on open moors or heaths, frequently on the side of a 
ravine, in a tuft of heath or projection of a rock or bank, 
and when this is the case, is composed of very scanty materials 
—a few sticks, with heather, grass, or moss—the bare ground 
almost sufficing for the purpose. In other countries it appears, 
occasionally at all events, to be built in trees, and is then 
made of sticks, and lined with wool. In the Orkney and 
Shetland Islands, it is placed among precipitous and inaccessible 
rocks. 
The eggs are three, four, or five, in number; Bewick says 
