EAGLE ATTACKING MAN 63 



mountains has also been mutilated by them, so 

 that under certain circumstances of helplessness 

 by accident or illness, they might easily become 

 dangerous, just as rats are in similar circumstances. 

 < It is rare, however, for any birds to attack man 

 for food ; still, this would seem to be the motive 

 for the attacks made on men in the water by Alba- 

 trosses, as in the case where these sea-birds attacked 

 the German sailors in the sea at our defeat of 

 German ships in the sea-fight off the Falklands ; 

 and no one with any wide knowledge of birds could 

 doubt that Eagles probably were in former times, 

 when they were more common and fire-arms less 

 so, very serious enemies to children. 



It must be remembered that only a very few 

 years ago a case was recorded in the Field in which 

 a Golden Eagle attacked an adult in Scotland, 

 though in this case the motive was apparently 

 revenge, as the man, a gamekeeper, had rescued a 

 Grouse from it earlier on the same day. Hassel- 

 quist, also, in his " Travels in the Levant," published 

 in the eighteenth century, credits an Owl, which he 

 calls Strix orientalis, but which is apparently only 

 the Common Barn- Owl from his description and 

 attribution to it of building- haunting habits, with 

 coming into houses in Syria at night, and destroying 

 babies if not carefully watched. 



I may say that on taking a little boy of two years 

 old with his parents to see the Owls at the Zoo 

 some years ago I noticed that all the large Eagle- 

 Owls abandoned their usual apathetic unseeing 



