old JOURNAL, BOMB A Y NA TVRAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. X, 



province and breeding with us. Its habits, diet, and size are much 

 those of a kestrel, but it is less a bird of the open ; and the plumage, 

 generally white below (except the wing-tips) and generally grey 

 above, with a white head, is very different from the kestrel's generally 

 reddish coloration. 



The Harriers ( Circus) are a fine group of hawks, well known to 

 our snipe and quail shooters, from their common habit of waiting on 

 tbe gun and robbing the gunner. However, they quite as often help 

 him; by marking down birds which he retrieves after all. The English 

 name is said to be derived from their method of quartering the ground, 

 compared to that of " harriers " (hare-hounds) drawing for a hare. 

 Neither derivation nor comparison deserves much faith, as the birds' 

 rsd-iiT,: is much more like that of a pointer or setter; and doubtless 

 a 3 harriers because they harry ; like William of Deloraine, 

 when ho " Harried tho lands of Kichard Musgrave ; and slew his 

 brother by dint of glaive.'' 



The Latin name is rnlucky in another way. Harriet*- r.i.r-io .^•;- 

 than most other hawkfi ; and Homer's " hires kirkos" '■ :' 



it "wheeling frdcon" Natives, and some sportsmen, call them 

 ^' kites,'" from their long wings and tail, but the latter is never 

 forked ; and they never touch carrion. Until lately they were 

 djften treated as allied to owls ; but are now superseded in that con- 

 lieciion by the Ospreys, for anatomical reasons. The French are apt 

 to call them " pygargues ;" but the classic '"pygargus" seems to have 

 been some other bird " living in towns and fields, with a white tail," 

 says Pliny, who classes it second amongst eagles.* Modern harriers 

 may be said, in a way, to have white tails ; but they do not now 

 dwell in towns, According to Jerdon, Linnseus, from whose ^'' Falco 

 pygargus " the French name is taken, meant the female " Hen Har- 

 rier," C cyaneus. Mr, Blanford does not use the word at all, himself, 

 and expressly denies it to Montagu's Harrier. 



His first is C. viacrurus, the Pale Harrier ; " Blue Kite " of our 

 last generation. 



It is a handsome bird and well Imown by its gull-like plumage ; 

 pearl-grey ohove and white below, in old cocks : reddish below when 



■" Possibly this may have been an Earn. One' of these ts" second among Eagles iu the 

 Umove of to-clay," and another does still build ioi "towns aud fields," in India, 



