BIRDS OF PREY. 177 



an addition, indeed, to the landscape ; and the hosts 

 of song-birds that seek cover when other hawks come 

 in sight pay not the slightest attention to this one. 

 Brief extracts from Wilson sum up the life-history 

 of this bird : 



" This formidable, vigorous-winged, and well-known bird subsists 

 altogether on the finny tribes that swarm in our bays, creeks, and 

 rivers, procuring his prey by his own active skill and industry, and 

 seeming no further dependent on the land than as a mere resting- 

 place, or, in the usual season, a spot of deposit for his nest, eggs, and 

 young. . . . 



" The Fish-hawk is migratory, arriving on the coasts of New York 

 and New Jersey about the twenty-first of March, and retiring to the 

 south about the twenty-second of September. Heavy equinoctial 

 storms may vary these periods of arrival and departure a few days, 

 but long observation has ascertained that they are kept with remark- 

 able regularity. . . . 



" The first appearance of the Fish -hawk in spring is welcomed by 

 the fishermen, as a happy signal of the approach of those vast shoals 

 of herring, shad, etc., etc., that regularly arrive on our coasts and 

 enter our rivers in such prodigious multitudes. . . . 



" The nest of the Fish-hawk is usually built on the top of a dead 

 or decaying tree, sometimes not more than fifteen, often upward of 

 fifty, feet from the ground." 



The nest, of late years, has been found occasionally 

 placed directly upon the ground. 



We now come to a strongly-marked family of 

 birds that have always attracted much attention to 

 themselves, principally because their active day is 

 our night. It is not true of these birds the owls 

 that they can only see when we cannot, and that they 

 are only active when the day is done. There are 

 some that are diurnal, and the others are more 

 strictly crepuscular than nocturnal. An owl is by 

 no means helpless if driven from his retreat at noon- 



