50 Bird - Lore 



ing I came again, alone, to tr}' once more. One event of the preceding 

 day, of which I had taken little note at the time, gave me a good deal of 

 hope as I now scanned the hillside from below. The female had sailed 

 down with a quarry to a place between the two cliffs, where from above I 

 could see nothing but trees, and a sound unlike her usual calling had 

 seemed to come from there after she had alighted. Knowing, however, 

 that the Falcons sometimes sat on, trees (I had seen one of them do it that 

 very morning), and seeing no rocks at the place, I had ignored the new- 

 note evidence as probably an error, and dismissed the matter for the time. 

 (There was no tree on the hillside which could have furnished a suitable 

 nesting cavity.) But now, looking from below, I was delighted to see an 

 isolated clifif of fair size underneath the place where the Hawk had seemed 

 to alight. 1 climbed toward this clifif with renewed hope, which was soon 

 increased by the mother's appearing overhead and beginning a series of 

 frantic plunges toward me, in a more determined fashion than ever before. 

 When I tried to scale the cliff, which at that point was only about fifty feet 

 high above the steep, wooded slope, she hurled herself at me, wildly 

 screaming, in such a frenzy of passion that I half expected to have to fight 

 her. The noble great bird always checked herself, however, just before she 

 reached my head, and swerved aside, with a strong rustling of her sharp, 

 steely, marvelously wielded wings. The cliff itself proved unclimbable at 

 that point, so I scrambled up the steep, sapling-covered slope that bordered 

 it, and presently came out on the flat top of the rock-face, shaded by small 

 birches and hemlocks. The mother was more furious than ever, and I 

 could not doubt that the nest was somewhere on the little clifif. Eagerly 

 peering over, I at once espied white down -feathers, gleaming through the 

 leaves of a birch; and in another second was feasting my sight on three 

 princely, dark -eyed young Peregrines, about four weeks old, with many 

 brown contour-feathers sticking through their milky fiufif. Success at last! 

 Their ledge, for a wonder, was within easy reach from above, and I was 

 soon on it with them, deafened by the redoubled screechings of the 

 anguished mother, and the concerted guinea-hen clatter of the youngsters. 

 Approached too closely, they threw themselves upon their backs, and fought 

 valiantly with bill and claws. Their feet were blue -gray and of ungainly 

 bigness, and their toes sometimes doubled up sideways under them as they 

 hobbled about. 



The ledge, which was covered with the wreckage of hens, Chickens, 

 Pigeons, Flickers and Blue Jays, as well as with excrement "and pellets, 

 was about six feet long by three feet wide, and overlooked most of the hill- 

 side. It was entirely inaccessible from below, but the merest child's play 

 to reach from above, being only about ten feet from the top, and shaded 

 by birch saplings which gave ample hand -hold for a descent. There was 

 even one sapling growing on the ledge itself. No vestiges of true nest- 



