OSPRE1. 



The White-tailed Eagle is much more frequently seen South oi 

 the Border than the Golden Eagle In fact, a year rarely passes 

 without some record of the occurrence of this fine bird in more 

 than one county of England, and those by no means always the 

 most northerly. On the rabbit warrens of Norfolk and Suffolk 

 they are frequently met with, and it not seldom happens that 

 two are seen together perhaps the young from the same nest 

 driven forth by their stern parents to seek their own living 

 in the wide world. 



The male Eagle of this species is known, like the male of many 

 other kinds of birds, to take his turn with his mate in incubating 

 their eggs. It would seem difficult for the observer to be mistaken 

 in this fact ; for the male bird, as is the case in the other families of 

 the Ealconida3 generally, is very distinctly smaller than the female 

 to the actual extent indeed of not much less than one-third of 

 the entire size. 



5. SPOTTED EAGLE (Aquila noevia), 

 Met with in Britain, once or twice only. 



We come next to a Raptorial Bird, whose food is procured 

 mainly from the water, namely, the 



6. OSPREY (Pandit haliwtu*). 



The Osprey, or Fishing Hawk, or Mullet Hawk, or Eagle 

 Fisher, * builds its nest sometimes on a tree, sometimes on some 

 part of an ancient and deserted building always on the highest 

 part, a turret or chimney for instance and sometimes on a rock 

 or precipitous scar. But a very favourite and almost charac- 

 teristic site speaking of the bird only as a British nird is on 

 some lone insular rock in a wild mountain loch in Scotland. 

 I extract a very striking description from " St. John's Tour in 

 Sutherland : " " The nest, was placed in a most curious situation. 

 About, a hundred and fifty yards from the shore, there rose 

 from the deep water a solitary rock, about ten feet high, shaped 

 like a broken sugar-loaf or truncated Cone On the summit of 

 this was the nest, a pi I* 1 of sticks of very jjreat depth, evidently 

 the accumulation of many breeding seasons, as the Osprey returns 

 year after year to the same nest. How this heap of sticks with- 

 stood the winter gales without being blown at once into tat 

 water puzzled me. * * * The female Osprey allowed our 

 ooat to approach within two hundred yards or so, and then 

 leaving her nest, sailed upwards with a circling flight, till sliQ 

 joined her mate high above us. 



Having reached the rock, and with some difficulty ascendsd 



* A translation of the Gaelic n&mo of the HT& 



