HONEY-BUZZARD. 95 
fitted to remove the obstacles which generally concealed its 
prey, than a superficial examination of the feet and legs 
would warrant us in ascribing to it. A few hours after- 
wards, the task was found to be entirely completed, 
the comb torn out and cleared from the immature young ; 
and after dissection proved that at this season (autumn), 
at least, birds or mammalia formed no part of the food. 
A steel trap, baited with the comb, secured the aggressor 
in the course of the next day, when he had returned to 
review the scene of his previous havoc.” 
The stomach of a specimen killed in the north of 
Ireland, and examined by Mr. Thompson of Belfast, ‘* con- 
tained a few of the larve and some fragments of perfect 
coleopterous insects ; several whitish coloured hairy cater- 
pillars ; the pupe of a species of butterfly, and also of the 
six-spot burnet moth.” The stomach of one examined by 
White of Selborne contained some limbs of frogs, and 
many grey snails without shells. 
Kixaminations have usually proved the food to have been 
the larve of bees and wasps, to obtain which the re- 
ceptacles containing them are scratched out and broken up 
in the manner described by Sir William Jardine. In one 
instance, in the case of a Honey Buzzard kept in confine- 
ment, I was told that it killed and ate rats, as well as 
birds of considerable size, with great ease and good appetite. 
Button says, that in winter, when fat, the Honey Buzzard 
is good eating. 
_This species builds or takes to a nest on a high tree in a 
wood or forest. White, in his Natural History of Sel- 
borne, says, that “a pair of Honey Buzzards built them a 
large shallow nest, composed of twigs, and lined with 
dead beechen leaves, upon a tall slender beech near the 
middle of Selborne Hanger, in the summer of 1780. In 
