218 FIELD-STUDIES OF RARER BIRDS 



important bearing on the case, this hawk, except 

 when in hot pursuit of a prospective quarry, and 

 sometimes at its eyrie, usually stands for all that 

 is wary. Farmers and others, whose homesteads 

 nestle amidst the folds of the Downs, and to whom 

 pigeons are a joy and a would-be profit, have a 

 fierce vocabulary for the Peregrine : they utterly 

 fail and naturally to see in the same light a fact 

 at which the naturalist rejoices, namely, that an 

 area nowhere much more than sixty miles from the 

 Metropolis itself can supply so noble a census of 

 so noble a creature. 



The Peregrine then is by far the finest bird we 

 possess. Who can but admire its symmetry of 

 form, who but revel in its superbly cut outline, full 

 of latent vigour and agile strength, as poised dis- 

 dainfully often on one leg on some shelf or 

 pinnacle far up a mighty ocean precipice or majestic 

 mountain side, it surveys its surroundings with 

 keenest of keen brown eyes? Nothing escapes its 

 haughty and penetrating gaze. -It looks as it 

 rightly is a very lord of the feathered creation. 

 Again, watch with startled admiration its im- 

 petuous, death-dealing stoop, as with closed pinions 

 pressed tightly to its sides, it hurls itself head- 

 long a steel-tinted wedge of solid feathering 

 at its panic-stricken victim ; regard with chastened 

 joy the sometime-tragic finale to the pursuit, when 

 the destroyer as it were rebounds from its prey 

 after that murderous mid-air stroke, so as to avoid 



