ISSUED IN BEHALF OF THE SCIENCE WHICH IT ADVOCATES. 



Volume II, 



JUNE, 1876. 



Number 4. 



HAWK BREEDING AND 

 MATING. 



; AVING taken sixteen sets of the larg- 

 er Hawks' eggs tins spring and iiiade 

 their habits in the breeding season a 

 special study for four years, I am led to 

 remark vipon two of their habits, more or 

 less pronounced in certain individuals, but 

 which are, on the whole, family character- 

 istics. I allude in the first place, of course, 

 to their love of locality. The most observ- 

 ant of collectors must have noticed that a 

 pair of Hawks will breed year after year in 

 the same woods, often indeed in the same 

 nest, and if hari'ied too closely, changing 

 their tenement but not their neighborhood. 

 When disturbed, they may shift only to the 

 next favorable tree, go over a fence per- 

 chance, higher up a ravine or hillside, or to 

 a remote corner of the same grove ; but 

 nothing short of death seems to make them 

 desert their haunts. Clearly it is their 

 home, and they will not be expatriated. In 

 '73 I took two from a set of five Cooper's 

 Hawk's eggs, leaving the rest as a decoy to 

 the old birds, which I wished to shoot and 

 have mounted. But after the first visit, I 

 could not again get near the wary birds and 

 the three young Avere reared in security. In 

 '74 there were five more eggs, from which 

 I took three, leaving two, and late in Jidy, 



revisiting the tree, the young, fully fledged, 

 were seen sitting on the edge of their eyrie, 

 trying their pinions. May 9th. '75 I took 

 the entire set of five eggs from this pair, 

 but this year have not yet had the pleasure 

 of welcoming them home. In these same 

 woods, three sets of eggs in as many sear 

 sons have been taken from a certain Red- 

 shouldered Hawk's nest ; last year they 

 built on the next tree but one, and are now 

 breeding but twenty rods away. A negro 

 at Sunny side for three years has taken fledg- 

 ed young for pets, from the nest of a Red- 

 tailed Hawk. This year I took three eggs 

 from this patriarchal tree, April 17tli. ; but 

 nidification continued, and in a wholly new- 

 nest in a neighboring oak I relieved these 

 Hawks of a second set of two eggs. May 

 8th. In one sense, even death itself may 

 be said not to drive them away, and this 

 brings me to my second topic, — the facility 

 with which they are mated when one of a 

 pair is killed. In '74 a pair of Red-tailed 

 Hawks bred on Blue Hill. The male was 

 caught in a steel trap, but the female raised 

 her young, and came back mated last year 

 to the same nest. She herself was tlien 

 shot on her nest from a brush house. This 

 year the male brought back a partner, a 

 new nest was built in sight of the old one, 

 and I took a set of two eggs with embryos 

 from it, April 22nd. Fi'om the pair of 

 Red-shouldered Hawks referred to above. 



