6 2 American Birds 



change his mind, for he swerved and sailed back a short 

 way to the left and suddenly dropped to the water like 

 an osprey. With heavy flapping of wings he struggled 

 to regain the air with the weight of a large carp that 

 was wriggling in his talons. As soon as the hawk reached 

 the bank he dropped the fish, evidently to let it die or 

 to get a better grip on the load. A few intervening bushes 

 cut off our view of the fisher and his catch, but we lay 

 quiet till the old hawk took wing again with his fish. He 

 could hardly scrape over the tops of the low willows as 

 he labored slowly toward his aerie in the cottonwood. 



That afternoon we were again at the nest tree with 

 our cameras. The parents, as usual, discovered our ap- 

 proach while we were some distance from their home, 

 and during the ascent they circled about overhead with 

 an occasional loud scream. When we looked into the nest 

 the fish feast was over, for only the tail-end of the carp 

 remained. The fish was originally over a foot in length, 

 and I should have judged it too heavy for the hawk to 

 carry such a distance had we not seen him do it. But 

 these birds of prey are powerful on the wing; they will 

 sometimes attack and kill animals as large as them- 

 selves. 



Occasionally a hawk will make a mistake. I have the 

 record of one of these hawks that was seen sitting on a 

 perch watching the ground below. Suddenly he poised 

 and dove straight for the prey. He seemed to strike 

 squarely, and began to rise with a small animal in his 

 talons. The bird rose for thirty or forty feet, and then, 

 with a scream, he began to flutter higher and higher, cir- 

 cling around, and all the time feathers were dropping 



