258 TEN YEARS IN SWEDEN. 



It is always said that the old males and females are of 

 the same colour, ash-grey, with dark transverse spots on 

 the breast. That this is more or less the plumage of very 

 old males I do not deny, but they are extremely rare with us. 

 In all the females, however, which I have shot from the nest, 

 and some have been very old (at least very large), the body 

 plumage has been the same, and I take this description, 

 from a very large female shot from the nest, with three re- 

 markably fine eggs, on the 2nd May, 1864. The whole 

 upper part dark shiny brown, rather rusty on the head ; 

 secondaries edged with white ; tail more grey, with about 

 four dark transverse bands across the upper side ; under part 

 yellowish white, with large longitudinal spots on the breast 

 which are much smaller and fewer, though longer, on the 

 belly; thigh- feathers with a pale rusty yellow tinge, and very 

 thin longitudinal dark streaks. This I take to be the general 

 plumage of most of the goshawks, both male and female, 

 that we kill. In both old and young the legs and cere are 

 yellow. I never had the luck to kill a male in the breeding 

 season, when alone we are able to determine by dissection 

 with certainty the male from the female ; but that this grey 

 plumage is not the common plumage of the male, but only 

 assumed at a very late period of life, I argue from the fact 

 of their being so very scarce. That the brown plumage be- 

 comes greyer from age, even in the females, I know from 

 examination, but probably it is never so ash-blue as in the 

 old male. 



Wright observes : " In stuffed specimens, especially 

 among such as have for a long time stood in a museum, the 

 colour becomes by degrees altogether grey-brown. Even 

 other birds, whose colour when living is grey-blue, undergo 

 a similar transformation when stuffed ; on which account it 

 is always safer to study the colours in living, or fresh killed 

 examples." 



The goshawk is one of the few of the family that remain 

 in Scandinavia throughout the winter; and Nilsson says, 

 which is probably the case, that it is the young birds which 

 leave the breeding place, and wander away ; the old ones re- 



