THE HARRIERS 103 



Its long pointed wings give it very graceful flight, and it seems more 

 addicted to soaring in wide circles than any of its relatives. 



According to Mr. Collingwood Ingram, the female alone incubates. 

 On returning to the nest, if her suspicions are aroused, she will alight 

 twenty or thirty yards off, then run to her nest through the heather. 

 Normally she rises straight from her brooding, absents herself thirty 

 or forty minutes, and returns, dropping straight down on the nest. 

 The male appears at intervals and often brings food, which the female 

 takes from him in mid-air. In some parts of France this species is 

 abundant, though less so than in times gone by, when, before the 

 autumn migration, it assembled to roost in thousands. 1 



The handsome marsh-harrier differs conspicuously from the two 

 species just described, not only in appearance, but in habits, shun- 

 ning the haunts of man and seeking the solitude of swamps. In 

 Montagu's day, he tells us, it was by far the " most common ' falcon ' 

 on the sandy flats of the coast of Caermarthenshire, where it preys 

 on young rabbits." He had the good fortune to see as many as nine 

 feeding at once on the carcass of a sheep. 



As we have already remarked, all the harriers evince an extra- 

 ordinary fondness for eggs, and these, it would seem, are carried 

 whole by the male to his sitting mate, on whom alone the task of 

 incubation falls ; for on one occasion Seebohm 2 found a nest of the 

 marsh-harrier at Riddaghausen, near Brunswick, containing four eggs, 

 one of the coot, apparently brought " thither to feed the sitting bird." 

 According to Naumann, 3 eggs form the principal diet so long as they 

 are to be had, and when this supply is over a heavy toll is levied on 

 the nestlings. Wild ducks and geese, however, he remarks, defend 

 their young with spirit and a large measure of success, buffeting the 

 marauder, while the young crouch down close together, and so offer a 

 less easy mark. Messrs. Ussher and Warren 4 also comment on the 



1 Zoologist, 1908, p. 310. 



* Seebohm, British Birds, vol. i. p. 126. 



3 Naumann, Naturgeschicht, Vdgel Mitteleuropas, v. 27. 



4 Ussher and Warren, Birds of Ireland, p. 120. 



