48 Bird -Lore 



courts ; the intense heat, which makes the birds loll and fidget ; the 

 pleasant effluvium, evidencing garter-snakes, and such like, and above 

 all, the habit the birds have of sneaking away just as one has them 

 nicely posed, — these are some of the amenities of this sort of pho- 

 tography. Yet there are compensations. Call it hypnosis, or what you 

 will, the young birds, until thirty-five days old. when the feathers 

 are quite fully grown, show themselves to be most patient sitters, 

 even when, to speak Irishly, they are lying on their backs. All this, 

 if one keeps his eye upon them. Thus, one four weeks' old bird lay 

 on his back not less than twentv minutes in the blazing sun with his 



MARSH HAWKS, 24 DAYS OLD 



eyes wide open, the blue-bottles buzzing about his head, and the 

 mosquitoes plying their beaks upon his cere. At this age the young 

 birds seem to become quite inured to the sun, yet they now spend 

 most of their time at some distance from the nest — from ten to fifty 

 feet — the paths that they severally and collectively use becoming 

 by this time well beaten and strewn with pellets and the cast-off 

 elements of their plumage. 



At about thirty-four days the first real attempt at flight begins. 

 No longer now, when the 3'oung bird is traced to his lair, will he 

 throw himself upon his back, in open-beaked defiance ; but he 

 rises at once just from under one's feet, and flaps, not ungrace- 

 fully, along the grass or bush-tops. At about forty days from birth 

 the young make fairly long flights, rising even above the tree-tops, 

 amid which some of them have been reared. 



Such is the life-history of a young Marsh Hawk^ — from egg to 

 air. Thirty days in the shell, and forty days a'growing — after who 

 knows how many da3s of site-surveying and nest-building, in all 



