The Audubon Societies 
SCHOOL DEPARTMENT 
Edited by MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT 
Address all communications to the Editor of the School Department, National 
Association of Audubon Societies, 141 Broadway, New York City 
APRIL—WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT HAWKS? 
If you cannot discover new birds in your locality, 
try to find something new about the old ones — 
is at hand. We shall soon welcome all our familiar friends, but, without 
neglecting them, let us open eyes and ears and find time either to add 
to the list or perhaps learn something new about a group of birds of which 
we may have grown contemptuous through familiarity. 
A dozen years ago, bird students thought they knew all there was to be 
learned about the Robin, Crow, Jay, and other common birds. Then came the 
improved photography, with its rapid lens and shutter and the focusing glass, 
wherein a moving object could be seen and caught exactly at the desired 
moment, and straightway we knew that we had almost everything to learn about 
the home-life of this living bird, even though scientists had already numbered 
every bone and feather of the dead ones. 
People often have a very good knowledge of the familiar song birds, as well 
as those of striking plumage; but the so-called Birds of Prey are passed by in 
bulk, and are merely called Hawks or Owls, as the case may be, with prejudice 
and a miscellaneous desire to kill lodged against the entire guild. 
But there are good Hawks, neutral Hawks and bad Hawks, in the same ratio 
as there are good and bad people, and the same obtains with the Owls. 
The Sharp-shinned Hawk is on the black list, so is Cooper’s Hawk and the 
Goshawk; but the sins of these three should not be let fall on the useful Sparrow 
Hawk, the devourer of grasshoppers, and other large insects and beetles,—_the 
Marsh Hawk of summer days and the open or partly wooded low meadows,—or 
the majestic Red-shouldered Hawk, who loves the woods near water where he 
can put his nest high in a tree, and yet have good frog-hunting near home. This. 
is the Hawk that cries Kiow! Kiou! in such a way that its identity by voice is 
sometimes mixed with that of the Blue Jay, who often has a hard time to prove 
an alibi! 
The Red-tailed Hawk, also called Hen Hawk, and decried by the farmer as a 
harrier of poultry, while a careful analysis of their food has shown that mice, 
and other mammals, reptiles and insects are by far a larger article of their diet 
than birds or poultry. Watch a pair of Red-tails circling through the air of an 
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(): CE more the little marsh frogs are peeping, and the return of the birds 
