506 THE WESTERN RED-TAIL. 
selves for sage-rats, yet deny them to their rightful owner, the Red-tail; and 
they pursue him fiercely with engines of destruction when he ventures to 
sample an imported Danish fowl. Verily these be troublous times for the 
aristocracy. Alackaday! 
Truth to tell, there is no more foolish obsession which afflicts farmer folk 
than this: that all Hawks should be killed at sight; unless it be this other: that 
all birds caught eating cherries are worthy of death. Penny wise pound 
foolish, both of them! The man who is worst injured by this folly is, of 
course, the farmer himself, but society also suffers thru him. Why—it is as 
if the man should send a charge of buckshot thru a boy who stooped to pluck 
a strawberry—the while he cared nothing that the cattle were ravaging his 
wheatfield for lack of that same small boy to drive them out. Listen; it is 
no exaggeration to say, that, insofar as the three most easily slaughtered 
species of Hawk are concerned, the Marsh Hawk, Swainson’s and the Red- 
tail, any farmer in the wheat-growing sections of this State could well afford 
to raise a hundred chickens annually and feed them to the birds, if by so 
doing he could secure immunity from the ravages of rodent pests. Yes; 
the excess of wheat which the pests destroy annually in root and in blade 
would feed the chicks and repay the trouble tenfold. 
Red-tailed Hawks no longer abound in this or any other section. Such as 
occur are found both east and west of the Cascades. In the Puget Sound 
country they appear only in the more open situations, on -prairies and the 
borders of clearings. On both sides they are partially resident, but least so 
on the eastern plateaus, where the winters are severe. By nature this hand- 
some bird is little afraid of man. Young birds, tho capable of sustained 
flight, refuse to believe ill of their human neighbors, to whom they have done 
no harm, and they fall easy victims to the prevalent bangitis. Older birds 
may halt on the tree-top for a fraction of a second too long, if they suppose 
the gunner is passing by and minding his own business; but if they catch the 
glint of intent in the human eye at a hundred yards, they are off—and safe. 
The Red-tailed Hawk is a soaring bird, a bussard, to speak accurately, 
altho the word has fallen needlessly into disrepute. Buzzard is a mere reap- 
pearance, thru the French, of the Latin Buteo. This doubtless from a primi- 
tive root now lost, bu or bow. One can almost see in this explosive syllable 
the utterance of a child struck with wonder at the near passage of some soar- 
ing Hawk. “Bou!” “See, Mamma (Ligurian or Latin matters not), big 
bird!” The wonder of it lies no less upon us of more thoughtful years— 
the wonder of flight, the beauty and the witchery of those lazy, high-flung 
circles. How consonant with sunshine and shimmering air and, anon, with 
peace itself, are those mystic circles of endless, unimpassioned quest! 
Our buzzard is seen to best advantage on the sage-brush plains, and 
especially if there be some outcropping of lava handy, where he may build 
