OSPREY. 97 
other kinds of birds, to take his turn with his mate in incubating 
theireggs. It would seem difficult for the observer to be mistaken 
in this fact ; for the male bird, as is the case in the other families of 
the Falconide generally, is very distinctly smaller than the female 
—to the actual extent indeed of not much less than one-third of 
the entire size. 
5. SPOTTED EAGLE—(Aquila nevia). 
Met with in Britain, once or twice only. 
We come next to a Raptorial Bird, whose food is procured 
mainly from the water,—namely, the 
6. OSPREY—(Pandion halixetus). 
The Osprey, or Fishing Hawk, or Mullet Hawk, or Eagle 
Fisher, * builds its nest sometimes on a tree, sometimes on some 
part of an ancient and deserted building—always on the highest 
part, a turret or chimney for instance—and sometimes on a rock 
or precipitous scar. But a very favourite and almost charac- 
teristic site—speaking of the bird only as a British bird—is on 
some lone insular rock in a wild mountain loch in Scotland. 
I extract a very striking description from “St. John’s Tour in 
Sutherland :” ‘The nest was placed in a most curious situation. 
About a hundred and fifty yards from the shore, there rose 
from the deep water a solitary rock, about ten feet high, shaped 
like a broken sugar-loaf or truncated cone. On the summit of 
this was the nest, a pile of sticks of very great depth, evidently 
the accumulation of many breeding seasons, as the Osprey returns 
year after year to the same nest. How this heap of sticks with- 
stood the winter gales without being blown at once into the 
water puzzled me. * * * The female Osprey allowed our 
boat to approach within two hundred yards or so, and ther 
* A translation of the Gaelic name of the bird. 
