384 HUNTERS WATCHING BIRDS OF PREY. 



close to the ears of human watchers what is passing 

 overhead. But over and above all these cases, there 

 must still remain vast numbers of instances, where these 

 flights escape observation, even of persons fond of natural 

 history, simply from want of practised habits of observation 

 on their part. Like the swiftly passing cloud drift, which 

 may be seen passing overhead hour after hour, in plain 

 view of everybody, which warns us of the approach 

 of a serious gale, these things are mostly not seen at 

 all. The gale suddenly bursts upon the astonished 

 observer, and people meet each other and remark: 

 " How very sudden ! What a changeable climate 

 ours is ! " Yet almost always, the coming up of a 

 considerable atmospheric disturbance, is under ordinary 

 circumstances plainly visible for some hours beforehand: 

 if people only made it a habit to look upwards occa- 

 sionally, and observe the signs of the heavens. This 

 we have no hesitation in positively asserting, after 

 long years of patient observation. * 



Sportsmen especially ought to exercise a constant 

 vigilance in wild countries, upon the movements of 

 birds of prey seen hovering often at very great al- 

 titudes overhead: as these birds are almost certainly 

 watching the movements of game, or of human beings, 

 within sight of them beneath. Hunters are often 

 directed to the whereabouts of dead or wounded animals 

 in this way. Hawks, and the smaller birds of prey, 

 in like manner, are watching for the reappearance of 



* Observers should by no means be discouraged, because every such 

 disturbance of the cloud regions is not always followed by the expected 

 gale, because atmospheric disturbances are often deflected through natural 

 causes, such as eddies of wind upwards into the regions of space, where 

 they of course expend their forces, unfelt upon the earth below. 



