PLATE I 

 SPARROW HAWK. Accipiter nisus 



May 2&//t, 1893. This Plate was taken from a nest in Gleny Wood, Lake 

 of Monteith ; it was built half-way up a larch-tree in a very thick part of the 

 wood, on the steep side of the hill covered with moss-covered rocks. I watched 

 the male soaring round and round above this part of the wood at a great height 

 in the air, and guessed there must be a nest somewhere about ; it was very 

 carefully hidden against the trunk of the tree, and it took me fully an hour to 

 discover its whereabouts. It was about thirty feet from the ground, and was 

 entirely built of larch twigs of different thicknesses, the outside ones being 

 the coarsest ; the whole nest was covered with a whitish down, and had three 

 or four of the bird's large wing-feathers in it. The female sat very close, as 

 the five eggs were highly incubated, and she swooped at me twice while I was 

 climbing up to the nest. 



At first I was rather doubtful whether I could get at the nest to photo- 

 graph it or not, but I managed it in the end by supporting my camera on a 

 thin branch on the next tree and fastening it to the trunk, so that I could look 

 across at the nest. I was seriously hampered by the exceeding rottenness of the 

 branches, as, in a thick wood, the lower branches of a larch are always very 

 weak and rotten, and break short off at the trunk the moment any weight is 

 put upon them. I was pretty well cramped by the time I succeeded in taking 

 two plates of it. 



I paid a visit to this nest when the young were fully fledged, and found 

 the whole place white-washed with their droppings, and strewn with pellets 

 and feathers. The nest itself was a mass of pellets and feathers, wings of the 

 Greenfinch, Chaffinch, and Willow Wren, and two or three skulls of mice. The 

 young birds, of which there were four, were out of the nest, on the slender 

 branches of the tree, climbing about in a very awkward manner and hanging 

 on with their bills like parrots. 



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