﻿An Experience in Tree-top Photography 



TWO NEWLY HATCHED BROAD-WINGED HAWKS 

 ONE EGG WHrCH HATCHED LATER 



and, by using a pocket wrench, could easily be forced into the hardest green 

 wood. 



Since my last visit, the third egg had hatched and all the young were 

 now covered with down resembling wool of a dirty, or buffy white color. 

 Feathers were appear- 

 ing on breast and 

 wings. The young- 

 sters appeared sleepy; 

 in fact, one picture was 

 taken as they lay with 

 their eyes closed. The 

 mother bird had 

 brought more material 

 to the nest, twigs of 

 cedar and beech with 

 the beech leaves largely 

 developed. 



In the arrangement 

 of the beech twigs 

 there was just a suggestion that they may have been so placed for shade, 

 as the situation of the nest was rather open and some rays of the sun 

 seemed always upon the young. But this may have been only a fancy. 



From among the sticks of the nest I picked up some freshly disgorged 

 pellets, composed mostly of the fur of such small mammals as mice, moles, 

 shrews, etc., with some remains of insects hard to identify, and part of a 

 large black ant. There were also traces of the feathers of some small bird. 



Around the tree on the ground were the discarded egg-shells that had 

 simply been thrown overboard when the young Hawks had no further use 

 for them. There seemed to be no special care to conceal the location of 

 the nest. The leaves of the beech and even of neighboring trees were 

 stained in every direction by the excrement of the young. Some of the 

 stains were as much as seven or eight feet from the nest horizontally, though 

 on a slightly lower plane. 



On this trip I took with me a box covered with burlap and with a hole 

 in one end to suggest a lens. This dummy camera I nailed to a limb four 

 or five feet from the nest, expecting the old bird to become so familiar with 

 it that later it could be replaced by the camera similarly covered {a la Her- 

 bert K. Job), and a picture obtained of the mother bird when she visited 

 her young. 



On June 9, as I approached the nest, the old Hawk appeared for the 

 first time, flying screaming through the wood. The young Hawks certainly 

 had not been neglected since my last visit. They seemed twice the size of 

 a week ago. As my head appeared above the edge of the nest all three 



