WILD WINGS 
276 
from a distance in the pines. Then I drove home with the 
eggs in a raging, late, wet snowstorm, cold, white, but not 
“ white-washed.” 
Lisually these hawks are silent and retiring when their 
nesting haunts are invaded, but on occasion they can be 
very vociferous. A pair once advanced to meet me, as I went 
through a grove in East Taunton, Massachusetts, one twenty- 
fifth of May, Hitting from tree to tree and scolding at me with 
all their might. Suddenly they disappeared. There were a 
dozen old nests about, and I could not decide which to climb 
to, so I withdrew for a while. I went farther than I intended, 
and it was nearly dark when I got back. It was not until 
I rapped the very last tree that the hawk whirred off into 
the gathering gloom. There was the nest fifty feet from the 
ground, up a slender pine that had no limbs, save rotten stubs, 
until one almost reached the nest. I confess I dreaded the 
climb alone there in the dusk, but I made it, and found five 
big, dirty eggs, well incubated, the second set of Cooper’s that 
I had discovered that day. 
It was with the Cooper’s Hawk that I first made de¬ 
monstration of the fact that the wildest hawk can be photo¬ 
graphed upon the nest, if sufficient time be taken, and proper 
methods used. It is hard enough to photograph a hawk’s 
nest from an insecure perch in a lofty tree, but it is as 
nothing compared with doing so when the adult bird is 
upon it. 
In the present instance I found a new nest in a hemlock 
tree, in some mixed woodland, forty-two feet from the ground. 
After the eggs had all been laid for some days, I began work 
bv nailing up low in a near-by tree a small box with a round 
hole in one end and a cloth over it, in rude imitation of 
a camera. The hawk was so shy that she would ffy even 
before I came within sight of the nest. I gave her about 
