Widmann — A Preliminary Catalog of the Birds of Missouri. 91 



in Clark Co. in the nineties, and it is reported as breeding from 

 Kansas City and Montgomery City. The last record comes 

 from St. Charles Co., June 1905, where in the tall grasses of the 

 club grounds it still succeeds in raising a brood. There are 

 probably a few more localities in the marshes of the Mississippi 

 flood plain and on the broad meadows of northern Missouri 

 where they can nest unmolested, but such chances become fewer 

 every year. As a transient visitant the Marsh Hawk plays a 

 prominent part still, not so much in spring from the middle of 

 March to the middle of April, as throughout fall and early winter 

 or until deep snow and severe cold drives it farther south. The 

 only time for which we have no records is from the middle of 

 January to the first of March, the period of lowest temperature 

 and deepest snow, often enforced by sleet and freezing rain. 

 This species is one of the so-called Chicken Hawks of our hunters, 

 who see in every large hawk a competitor and therefore an enemy. 

 It is accused of killing quails, young rabbits and other game, 

 though a careful study of its feeding habits by the Department 

 of Agriculture has shown that it is extremely useful, because 

 feeding principally upon meadow mice and other injurious 

 rodents. While this may be of no concern to the hunter, it 

 should be the aim of the farmer to give, at least on his own 

 grounds, the fullest protection to a benefactor that removes the 

 pest which eats his grain and girdles his fruit trees. Unlike 

 other hawks with which they are commonly confounded, par- 

 ticularly the Cooper's Hawk, the real robber of young chickens, 

 the Marsh Hawks are so little shy that, while hunting low over 

 the ground, they often pass within easy range of the gunner, 

 who seldom fails to kill the poor bird. In spring and fall they 

 serve as scavengers preying upon crippled and dead birds, 

 which frequently lie far from the spot where they received the 

 shot, and are lost to the gunner. 



*332. AcciPiTER VELOX (Wils.). Sharp-shinned Hawk. 



Falco velox. Falco fiLscus. Accipiter ficscus. Nisus fuscus. Astur velox. 

 Accipiter, Astur and Nisus pensylvanicus. Accipiter fringilloides. 



Geog. Dist. — Breeds throughout the United States and the 

 wooded parts of the British Dominion and Alaska. Winters 

 from latitude 40° southward to Central America. 



The Sharp-shinned Hawk, for which a better name would be 

 Sparrow Hawk, particularly so because it exactly represents 



