loo British Birds, with their Nests and Eggs. 



the}' are easily- to be shot, and the nest, placed upon the gronnd, can be discovered 

 without difficulty. One marshman boasted that his gun had accounted for eight 

 in one season. The males, known to the natives of the Broads as the Blue Jacket, 

 arrived about a fortnight before the females, at the end of April or beginning of 

 May, and might have been seen in old days beating over the fens with a buoyant 

 tern-like flight, seeking their prey which comprised snakes, lizards, large insects, 

 such as dragon-flies, mice, frogs, 3'oung birds, and birds' eggs, and occasionally 

 3'oung rabbits and leverets. The cry of this Harrier is stated to resemble the 

 scream of the Kittiwake. The nest is smaller than that of the Hen-Harrier, is 

 composed of stalks of plants, a few sticks, and grass, and is lined with fine grass. 

 It has been found in a clover-field, or among furze, and in the fens ; Emerson, 

 in his account of the Birds of the Norfolk Broad-land, writes: — "If the marsh be 

 moist, the flat nest, smaller than a Marsh-Harrier's, is raised from seven to fifteen 

 inches from the marsh bottom ; on the other hand, if the marsh be dry, the nest 

 does not rise much above the ground. And the materials vary according to the 

 marsh crops growing alongside — old sallow sticks, grass, soft rushes, sedge, and 

 occasionally a few of their own feathers being the chief stuffs employed. And 

 directly the first egg is laid on the reedy boat — floating as it were on the green 

 sea — the hen begins to sit, and closely she sits, never leaving the nest for long. 

 Indeed, many fenmen have nearl}- caught her with their hands whilst sitting, so 

 devoted is she to her four bluish-white eggs." 



" In earl}' spring, perhaps some fine morning you will not see a cock 

 Montagu in the sky, when suddenly a brown hen flies with her heavier 

 beat in from the sea, and then the blue air resounds with a far-reaching 

 Kittiwake-like shriek. The *shaling cock has seen her, and flies down like light- 

 ning to court her, and perhaps to fight another cock, who has been waiting for the 

 hens as well as he, for there are generall}' more cocks come over than hens ; and 

 they fight fiercely, as the fenmen bear testimon}', though I have never seen one 

 of these love-combats, but fenmen tell me they have often seen them fighting and 

 shrieking in the air at the pairing season." 



The writer possesses examples of Montagu's Harrier from Kent, Cornwall, 

 and Dorsetshire, and has himself seen the birds at large on Kxmoor in the early 

 summer. In North Devon 3'oung birds in the dark red plumage used to be far 

 from uncommon in August and September around Barnstaple, and were not un- 

 frequently shot and brought to the bird-stuffer in that town. A brood of three 

 3'Oung birds in white dowTi was taken from a nest just outside Poole, in Dorset- 

 shire, in the summer of 1892 ; these the writer has, together with the cock bird, 



* Querj- — soaring. 



