Pleasant ! 
BY J. M. W., NORWICH, CONN. 
It is pleasant, when we start out in April for the 
old haunts of the Buteos, to miss not only the 
birds and their nests but to find that the wood- 
chopper has been before us and the very forest 
itself has disappeared. But to this we must sub- 
mit many times more at the hands of the improy- 
ident Connecticut farmer. Pleasant, too, it was, 
early this season, when returning for a set of B. 
lineatus which we had marked down, to find the 
completed set of four in the hands of a young 
brigand who held it for a king’s ransom. But 
were our reflections really pleasant on the 1st day 
of April, when, after climbing sixty feet to a 
new and finely feathered nest of B. borealis, we 
found the clutch gone and a hen’s egg substituted, 
bearing the legend arrit Foon. To avoid sus- 
picion the practical jokers had raised a twenty- 
eight feet ladder against the tree, leaving no 
abrasions on the butt. 

A young Norwich collector had a still livelier 
experience in mid-air near a farm house, April 
24th, finding the clutch of Buteo’s eggs covered 
by two unsprung steel-traps! After incubation 
begins, traps set in this way prove very murder- 
ous—both male and female hawks often being 
taken. I can well remember how pleasant it was, 
one May day, going through Lantern Hill woods, 
to see a big set of fourteen Wood Duck’s eggs in 
the hands of a farmer, deaf to the demands of 
science, who proposed to put the egos under his 
old Dominick and take the ducklings to the 
county fair! It was pleasantly exciting to chase 
all around a factory village after a stolen set of 
Fish Hawk, securing it finally after a raid on 
three different hen coops. It is very consoling 
to know that my 1886 set of Mottled Owl is at 
this moment addling under a Seabright bantam 
in this goodly city of Norwich. 
Yes, these and kindred field experiences are 
pleasant, but they are not exactly joys forever. 
So I will cite but one more “ pleasing instance.” 
It was with a comparative degree of pleasure last 
May that I found out that a trout fisherman had 
taken a set of my Marsh Hawks’ eggs, but it was 
not superlatively pleasant in June to see this 
finely marked clutch all be-smirched and nest- 
stained under a barn-yard fowl. The fisherman 
had told the farmer that he had found five eggs 
of the Dusky Duck. At the moment I sincerely 
wished the eggs would hatch, the young hawks 
mature and eat up in detail all the poultry on the 
farm. Perhaps it was to equalize this set-back, 
that the same season I took three sets of eggs 
ORNITHOLOGIST 
[Vol. 11-No. 7 
from one Harrier, and the season before three 
more sets from the same bird—twenty-three in all. 
I am inclined to think there is little to be 
gained placing the eggs of Raptores under our 
domestic fowls. The late Dr. Wm. Wood, of 
East Windsor Hill, said I was the only pseudo- 
naturalist who had helped him to find the true 
period of incubation of our Rapacious birds; the 
text books were all guess work on this point, he 
claimed. I sent him at various times sets of 
Barred Owl, Cooper's Hawk, and Red-shoul- 
dered Hawk; and whether under fowls or in in- 
cubators, the eggs all addled, with the exception 
of one Red-shouldered Hawk, which chipped the 
shell in twenty-nine days. But was this a cru- 
cial test ? 
The Number of Eggs Laid by the 
Red-tailed Hawk. 
BY J. W. PRESTON, BAXTER, IOWA. 


In late numbers of the ORNITHOLOGIST AND 
O6LoGIsT there have appeared several references 
in regard to the color of eggs of the Red-tailed 
Hawk, (Buteo borealis), and the number of eggs 
in a set; therefore perhaps a few extracts from 
my field notes may not prove uninteresting. 
In a number of years collecting I have taken 
no fewer than seventy-five sets of eggs of this 
species, and examined many more, mainly from 
central Iowa. In this large series I have found 
but five sets of two eggs each, two having four 
ach, and all the others contained three eggs 
each except one, which had but one egg—well 
incubated. 
In four instances the sets showed one egg en- 
tirely unmarked, while the other two were richly 
marked. About one third of the sets have been 
light colored, the very large proportion being of 
a bold, heavy pattern. I have usually found the 
ground color to be a light green, or greenish 
white, in fresh specimens, but fading after a few 
day’s incubation. The rich brown spots also 
fade to some extent. This, I believe to be also 
true of the eggs of many species of hawks, es- 
pecially noticeable in the case of those of the 
Marsh Hawk, (Cireus hudsonius), where the fresh 
egg is a beautiful light green, but it fades to dull 
white within a day or two. 
{It is probable that most of the readers of the ORNITHOL- 
OGIST AND ObLOGIsT will fail to agree with Mr. Preston that 
the typical clutch of eggs of the Red-tailed Hawk is three. 
Two is much more commonly the number. In a series of 
twenty-seven sets before the present writer, (collected in 
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Towa, ‘Texas, and Mississippi,) 
there are nineteen sets of two eggs, six of three, and two 
of four. Mr. F. H. Carpenter has a series of thirty-six sets 
of two each, collected in Connecticut, Massachusetts and 
New York; and “J. M. W.” writes that ‘*the clutch of 
Buteo borealis is two.”—Ep. 
