FAR AND NEAR 



and hawks for a year, it would be found at the end 

 of that time that most of them had a balance to their 

 credit. They do us more good than injury. A few 

 of them, such as the fish crow, the sharp-shinned 

 hawk, Cooper's hawk, and the duck hawk, are de- 

 structive to song-birds and wild fowl ; but the others 

 subsist mainly upon insects and vermin. 



One August, when I was a boy, I remember a 

 great flight of sparrow hawks, — so called, I sup- 

 pose, because they rarely if ever catch sparrows. 

 They were seen by the dozen, hovering above and 

 flitting about the meadows. On carefully observing 

 them, I found they were catching grasshoppers, — 

 the large, fat ones found in the meadows in late 

 summer. They would poise on the wing twenty 

 or thirty feet above the ground, after the manner 

 of the larger hawks watching for mice, then sud- 

 denly drop down and seize their prey, w^hich they 

 devoured on the limb of a tree or a stake in the fence. 

 They lingered about for several days and then drifted 

 away. 



Nearly every season a pair of broad-winged 

 hawks — about a size smaller than the hen-hawk — 

 build their nest in the woods not far from my cabin. 

 You may know this hawk by its shrill, piercing cry, 

 the smoothest, most ear-piercing note I know of 

 in the woods. They utter this cry when you approach 

 their nest, and continue to utter it as long as you 

 linger about. One season they built in a large pine« 



158 



