262 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



seen by Mr. Farren. The honey-buzzard, however {Falco 

 apivorus), comes regularly over from Germany about the end 

 of May, attracted, in some measure, perhaps, by its favourite 

 food, the larvae of wasps and bees, but chiefly by the wide range 

 of the woods. At Mark Ash and Puckpits I have frequently, 

 for an hour together, watched a couple, sailing with their wings 

 outspread, allowing the wind, on a boisterous day, to catch 

 them, till it almost veered them over; just circling round the 

 tops of the beeches, sometimes even " tumbling," like a pigeon, 

 and answering each other with their sharp, short cry, prolonged 

 every now and then into a melancholy wail. Its favourite 

 breeding stations are amongst the tall beech-woods round Lynd- 

 hurst, in Mark Ash, and Gibbs Hill, Puckpits, Coalmeer, Prior's 

 Acre, and the oaks of Bentley and Sloden. The nest is always 

 placed in the old one of a crow, or even the common buzzard, 

 whose young by that time have flown, and sometimes made on 

 the top of a squirrel's "cage," the birds contenting themselves 

 with only re-shaping it, and lining the inside with fresh green 

 leaves. The fact of a squirrel's "cage" being used will account 

 for the nest being sometimes found so low, and on a compara- 

 tively small tree. No rule can therefore be laid down as to its 

 position. I have known the bird build in very different situa- 

 tions. Mr. Rake found its nest in Sloden, on the forked bough 

 of a low oak, not thirty feet from the ground. In 1860 a pair 

 built, not very much higher, in the overhanging branch of a 

 beech in Puckpits ; and, in the same year, another pair reared 

 their young on the top of a fir in Holmy Ridge Hill. And in 

 1861 and 1862, I knew of two nests, not fifty yards apart, in 

 Mark Ash, each placed nearly at the top of the very tallest 

 beeches in the wood, at least seventy or eiglit}^ feet from the 

 ground. As so little aj^pears to be known about its breeding 



262 



