THE ROBBERS OF THE FALLS 



nest, or another not far from it. Sometimes they 

 alternate between two or three nests, which remain as 

 landmarks for years. 



This was the case with a pair of Red-tails about four 

 miles from my home. About every other year they 

 would go off to some nest which I did not succeed in 

 locating, but the next year they would be in either of 

 two nests about two hundred yards apart. One was a 

 big affair, sixty feet up a giant oak which grew from 

 the foot of quite a precipice. From the top of this 

 ledge, by climbing a sapling, one could see into the nest. 

 It was a hard matter, though, to climb the old oak to 

 the nest, the trunk was so thick and the bark so loose. 

 But Ned did it with the help of a rope, and photographed 

 the nest and eggs very successfully. 



The other nest was in a chestnut stub, forty feet up. 

 Back from it the hill sloped up quite abruptly. There 

 was a thick hemlock tree with branches down to the 

 ground on this slope near the nest. One day I pitched 

 my umbrella tent under the hemlock, and the next 

 afternoon when she had become accustomed to it, I 

 had Ned leave me hidden in it and took three pictures 

 with my high-powered telephoto lens of the mother 

 hawk as she returned to the nest. 



This last season the pair occupied a new nest in the 

 same woods, in a chestnut tree which grew near a 

 hemlock. There was one young hawk in the nest, 

 hatched about the twenty-seventh of April. Up in the 

 hemlock I rigged a dummy camera which was so well 



49 



