MERLIN. 87 



approached; it is only by accident that it is occasionally met 

 with within gun-shot. 



The Merlin flies low, and with great ease and celerity. It 

 suddenly sweeps hy, and is gone almost before you have had 

 time to glance at it, gliding along the side of a hedge or 

 wood, and then over, or into it, and sometimes affording a 

 more lengthened view, by its flight over the open fields, or 

 the wide moor, where it may be seen following its prey 

 through its devious track, according to the nature of the 

 ground. 'In pursuit of prey,' says Sir William Jardine, 'the 

 Merlin does not often mount above it and rush down, as we 

 have generally seen the Peregrine, but at once gives chase, 

 following the victim through all its turns and windings to 

 escape, and unless cover is at hand, is generally successful.' 



Its principal food consists of birds; and it attacks and slays 

 those which are even double its own size, such as partridges, 

 and also quails, plovers, and pigeons, as well as larks, linnets, 

 starlings, sandpipers, snipes, chaffinches, blackbirds, swallows, 

 thrushes, goldfinches, and others which are smaller; as also 

 cockchaffers and other insects. In pursuit of shore birds, 

 dunlins, ring dotterels, and others, it will course them to the 

 edge of, and sometimes even over the water. It is so deter- 

 mined on and in the capture of its prey, that it is difficult 

 to make it leave that which it has secured, and which it 

 often obtains by pouncing on it unawares, but it also chases 

 it in the open air. The lesser birds it captures from the 

 ground, but those which are too large to be thus borne off, 

 it can only surprise when on the wing. It frequently perches 

 on a stone or crag, flitting from one to another, as if for 

 the purpose of surveying all around it, and when a flock 

 of small birds comes within its ken, it singles out one from 

 the rest, and is not attracted from it to any of the others. 



The nest is generally, in this country at least, built on the 

 ground on open moors or heaths, frequently on the side of a 

 ravine, in a tuft of heath or projection of a rock or 1 bank, 

 and when this is the case, is composed of very scanty materials 

 a few sticks, with heather, grass, or moss the bare ground 

 almost sufficing for the purpose. In other countries it appears, 

 occasionally at all events, to be built in trees, and is then 

 made of sticks, and lined with wool. In the Orkney and 

 Shetland Islands, it is placed among precipitous and inaccessible 

 rocks. 



The eggs are three, four, or five, in number; Bewick says 



