X "'i'u:; XX | Sherman, Neat Life of the Sparrow Hawk. 407 



had Sparrow Hawks nested, yet for years man and nature had been 

 at work preparing the way for them. Four years prior to this 

 lightning had smitten the tallest and fairest willow of a group 

 of these trees, and its dead branches invited the Hawks to rest; 



there the home-seeking pair found facing them, eighty feet away, a 

 hole in my hied blind that gave entrance to a nesting box whose bot- 

 tom surface, eight by twelve inches in dimensions, was deeply cov- 

 ered with sawdust and excelsior. This place seemed to satisfy them 

 for several days until they ventured to the barn, where they found 

 eight other boxes similarly furnished for nesting and roosting places 

 for flickers. During the next two weeks they visited the various 

 boxes and scratched in the excelsior, their choice of a nesting place 

 seemingly pointing toward the barn, but in this they were not 

 encouraged. Toward the end of April they again frequented the 

 dead w illow and the box in the blind became their final choice. 



There the first egg was deposited on April 28 before eleven o'clock 

 in the morning, and an egg was laid on each alternate day until the 

 sixth, and last, on May 8. That the hour for laying was later than 

 that of many common species appears from the fact that on April 

 30 the second egg had not been laid at half past nine in the morning, 

 but was in the nest by four o'clock in the afternoon, when the nest 

 was again visited and the female found at home. Each egg was 

 weighed upon the day it was laid, and their weights in the order 

 of laying were 212, 227, 220, 225, 228 and 204 grains respectively. 

 Four of these salmon-colored eggs were very similar in appear- 

 ance, 1 tearing large blotches of a chocolate brown, the sixth egg 

 was finely speckled instead of blotched, while the fifth was strik- 

 ingly different from the others having large unmarked spaces of 

 the ground color through the center, and some blotches on the ends. 

 The bird that came from it was as marked in its disposition as the 

 egg-shell was in its coloring. 



Incubation was performed mainly by the female, only once was 

 the male found in the nest, which he did not leave until the blind 

 had been noisily entered, since by the female sitting on her favorite 

 perch we had been led to think that the nest was unoccupied. On 

 the other hand the female was accustomed to fly from the nest the 

 instant the key touched the lock of the door, if she had not already 

 flown upon hearing human footsteps or voices. Sometimes it was 



